A few weeks before Lockdown I spent a day wandering around what might be considered the literary and publishing epicentre of London. I took the train to St Pancras and the Metropolitan line tube to Great Portland Street, as I was meeting a friend for a few beers at The Fitzroy Tavern. The pub was a favourite of literary types in the nineteen fifties when the likes of Dylan Thomas with his wife Caitlin would regularly imbibe there. Rumour has it that he left an early draft of Under Milkwood there after a particularly heavy session! This area of London is known as Fitzrovia in allusion to its Bohemian past. After drinks with my friend, I wandered eastwards. I passed through some of London’s loveliest, leafiest squares. First up was Bedford square, where Ian McEwan once lived ( he lived in Oxford prior to that ), and where he set his novel Saturday. I crossed Tottenham Court Road and meandered down University Street toward UCL and the part of London known as Bloomsbury. I ambled along Gower Street, noting a blue plaque to The Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood. I passed the lovely Waterstones bookshop and on towards Gordon Square, where Virginia Woolf once lived.

This is where the Bloomsbury Set all lived and created, almost a century ago now. A short walk further took me to the back of the British Museum and Russell Square. Just around the corner are the offices of Faber and Faber, publishers of Sally Rooney’s amazing book Normal People, which I enjoyed reading the other week. I retraced my steps back towards the southern end of Gower Street, passing a fantastic drum shop in Store Street, before ending up in Bedford Square, full of sublimely beautiful Georgian townhouses, within one of which the publishing house Bloomsbury has its offices. That would be a lovely place to work in, I thought to myself. This is where the Harry Potter series was published; no wonder they can afford the sumptuous offices in Bedford Square!

Passing back up Gower Street I noticed an abundance of blue plaques to Darwin, the Suffragette Millicent Fawcett and one to commemorate the first ever general anaesthetic, administered at UCH. By this time I had had enough culture and the beer was beginning to induce a pleasant somnolence. So, I picked a quiet spot, a bench in a corner of Gordon Square; and there I let my eyelids close and the early spring sunshine induced a very pleasant few minutes of sleep, before I got the tube back home from Euston Square!