A Bloomsday

I sometimes like to drift in London instead of heading for somewhere in particular. My preferred haunts, beyond Hampstead, are Spitalfields and Bloomsbury. Today it was the latter so I hopped on a 168 from Haverstock Hill and got off at Russell Square. It's an area familiar to me from university days as it was to my father before me - he had several addresses around here. Walking east I met the goats from Coram Fields peering through a fence and I pulled some fresh leaves off the trees they were straining towards to supplement the parched grass. Thomas Coram, (far right) was the first philanthropist to extend help to abandoned children who abounded on the streets of London in the 17th/18th centuries. Born in 1668, he established the Foundling Hospital, now a museum, to care for them and the charity still provides services for children in need today. I wasn't allowed to enter the Fields myself, without an accompanying child.
I wandered down Lamb's Conduit Street (always pronounced by my father in the old fashioned way 'cunduit') passing the The Lamb with its Victorian interior, one of his favourite pubs. Nowadays this old street is full of high-end shops and eating places. I dropped into the delightful home Persephone Books (top centre) an independent publisher of out-of-print editions mostly by women and managed to come away with one only.
I admired ladies who lunch, ( left), as one who doesn't, wondering again how people can stomach a full meal+wine in the middle of the day and then go back to work or whatever they do.

I crossed Theobald's (pron.Tibbald's) Road and found myself in Red Lion Square where I stopped for coffee beside one of the colourful book benches (bottom left) currently being used to promote literacy "Literary classics ranging from Peter Pan to The Day of the Triffids are being celebrated in a series of colourful illustrated benches". This square is home to the Conway Hall Ethical Society (bottom centre), the oldest surviving freethought organisation in the world, still actively promoting humanism and atheism. Currently it's running a series of discussions on pacifist opposition to the First World War. The statue (far right) is of the lifelong conscientious objector and political figure Fenner Brockway who was imprisoned as a traitor for his refusal to be conscripted; he remained left-wing agitator for the rest of his long life.
On my route back to catch the bus again I passed the one-time homes of Percy Bysshe and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in Marchmont Street and of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Tavistock Place, just a short walk, but a hundred odd years, apart.
Such is Bloomsbury.