London Bloomsbury Tourist Map

Bloomsbury is the leafy, bookish district north of Covent Garden, between Tottenham Court Road, Euston Road and Gray's Inn Road. It is built around Georgian garden squares, home to University College London and, in the early 20th century, to the writers and artists of the Bloomsbury Group, including Virginia Woolf. Blue plaques are everywhere, and the streets stay calm even when Oxford Street is packed.

The district's anchor is the British Museum, free and open daily, with the Rosetta Stone, the Parthenon sculptures and Egyptian mummies under the glass roof of the Great Court. On Doughty Street, the Charles Dickens Museum is the house where Dickens lived from 1837 to 1839 and wrote Oliver Twist. At the district's western edge, the Dominion Theatre stages big West End musicals.

For the curious: Jeremy Bentham's Auto-Icon, the philosopher's preserved skeleton dressed in his own clothes, sits in a glass case in UCL's Student Centre. Nearby, UCL's Grant Museum of Zoology crams skeletons and specimens in jars into one Victorian room, and the free Wellcome Collection on Euston Road shows medicine, art and the human body. Novelty Automation is an arcade of satirical home-made machines. Coram's Fields is a seven-acre playground where adults may only enter with a child, and in Russell Square a green Victorian cabmen's shelter still serves tea to taxi drivers.

When to go: the British Museum is busiest on weekend afternoons; arrive at 10am opening or come on a Friday, when it stays open until 8.30pm and is noticeably quieter. The Charles Dickens Museum opens Wednesday to Sunday and the Wellcome Collection is closed on Mondays. Stations: Russell Square, Holborn, Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street and Euston Square.