Bloomsbury

The weather's supposed to turn chilly again from tomorrow, so we decided to have another guided wander while warmth still filled the late-afternoon air, this time through Bloomsbury. The sun glinted off the attractive lettering of the former J. Evans Dairy

and we passed many pretty entranceways along the way:

Fitzroy Square is just one of the expansive private greenspaces in Bloomsbury.

Although I've walked past this building on Tottenham Court Road many times, I don't think I've ever really looked at it, and it deserves a thoughtful look! (It used to be a linoleum shop--the best in town, apparently.)

Now if someone invited you to the Eisenhower Centre, do you think you'd put on your best fancy dress? Well, if you did, you'd be disappointed, because this is where you'd be headed:

The Eisenhower Centre was one of London's wartime deep-level shelters--each shelter generally made use of extra tunnels associated with a nearby tube station and had two above-ground entrances, situated some distance apart. The entrances were then protected by specially made "pill box" buildings, of which you can see two in the above photo. Within these pill-box structures, spiral staircases descended deep into the shelter's tunnel system. The Eisenhower Centre shelter connected with Goodge Street tube and was General Eisenhower's headquarters during wartime. Much of the D-Day invasion was planned from within this shelter, and the occupants were in direct communication with the Cabinet War Rooms. Like many deep-level shelters, this one is currently used as storage space (for film and video, in this case). As we continued walking, I liked this figure on one of the entrances of the RADA (Royal Academy of Dramatic Art) building:

We were walking beside this next building when I looked up and noticed a blue plaque. I didn't think the name sounded familiar, so I kept walking, but when Bob saw me looking up, he looked too and said, "Oh, come on, take a photo of Bob." Since Bob isn't one of those people who refers to himself in the third person (or likes his picture taken), I looked at the plaque again and realised that "Robert Nesta Marley" was, in fact, Bob Marley, who lived in this Ridgmount Gardens building when he first came to London in 1972.

Many of the block's entranceways were nicely adorned:

Spring blossoms decorated Gordon Square:

Number 50 overlooks the square and its brown plaque serves as a general commemoration to the Bloomsbury Group. The (punctuation-free) plaque reads: "Here and in neighbouring houses in the first half of the 20th century there lived several members of the Bloomsbury Group including Virginia Woolf Clive Bell and the Stracheys."

We were only about halfway through the walk at this point, but when we passed by Russell Square, with its adjacent tube station, we decided to cut our tour short and zoomed home on the Piccadilly Line, just ahead of the real rush-hour crush when taking the tube becomes a farce of fighting for breathing space!