Squeezed between Bloomsbury to the east and Marylebone to the west, Fitzrovia is the small London quarter that has done more bohemian living per square yard than almost anywhere in the capital. Walk its grid of Georgian streets for an afternoon and you pass the home of Virginia Woolf, the birthplace of the man who founded the Pre-Raphaelites, the studio of the painter who designed the British Museum, the navigator who put the name Australia on the map, and the broadcasting house where half of British radio comedy was made. The blue plaques of Fitzrovia record a neighbourhood that has always belonged to artists, writers, scientists, and broadcasters. Did you know the area takes its name from a single pub?
Fitzrovia sits across the boundary of Camden and Westminster, bounded roughly by Oxford Street to the south, Euston Road to the north, Tottenham Court Road to the east, and Great Portland Street to the west. It was named, informally and then permanently, after the Fitzroy Tavern on Charlotte Street, the pub where the writers and painters of the 1920s and 1930s drank, and after Fitzroy Square at its heart. That square is where this walk begins, and where the blue plaque scheme found one of its richest seams of famous residents.
Fitzroy Square: The Heart of Bohemian London
No address sums up Fitzrovia better than Fitzroy Square, a handsome Georgian set-piece partly designed by the Adam brothers, and the place where the neighbourhood's artistic reputation was made. The plaque at 29 Fitzroy Square records that Virginia Woolf (1882-1941), "novelist and critic, lived here 1907-1911." It was in this house that Woolf, recently moved from Bloomsbury, held the gatherings that helped turn a circle of friends into the Bloomsbury Group. The same house had earlier been home to the playwright George Bernard Shaw, marked separately on the building, so two of the most important writers in modern English literature lived behind the same front door a generation apart.
Woolf was not the only member of the Bloomsbury Group to settle on the square. At 33 Fitzroy Square, a plaque marks the home of Roger Fry (1866-1934), "artist and art critic." Fry was the man who introduced Britain to Post-Impressionism, coining the term itself, and in 1913 he founded the Omega Workshops nearby, a design studio that put Bloomsbury artists to work on furniture, textiles, and ceramics. The square was, for a few decades, the working address of the people who reshaped British taste.
The square's plaques reach back further than Bloomsbury. At 7 Fitzroy Square lived Sir Charles Eastlake (1793-1865), the painter who became the first Director of the National Gallery and did more than anyone to build its early collection. At 21 Fitzroy Square, a plaque marks a home of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, Lord Salisbury (1830-1903), three times Prime Minister, and at 9 Fitzroy Square one commemorates August Wilhelm von Hofmann (1818-1892), the German chemist whose London laboratory trained a generation of British chemists. Artists, a gallery director, a Prime Minister, and a chemist, all on one square.
Charlotte Street and the Painters of Fitzrovia
If Fitzroy Square was the neighbourhood's drawing room, Charlotte Street and the streets around it were its studios. Fitzrovia drew painters for two centuries, partly because the light and the cheap rooms suited them, and the plaques record an unbroken line of them.
At 81 Charlotte Street, a plaque marks the home of Sir Robert Smirke (1780-1867), the architect of the British Museum, whose great Greek Revival facade is one of the defining buildings of London. A few streets away at 37 Foley Street, a plaque records Henry Fuseli (1741-1825), the Swiss-born Romantic painter whose nightmarish canvases, above all The Nightmare, made him one of the most original artists of his age. And at 110 Hallam Street, on the western edge of the quarter, a plaque from 1906 records that Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), poet, painter, and founder of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, "was born here." The man who launched the most famous movement in Victorian art began his life in Fitzrovia.
The literary thread runs alongside the painters. At 71 Berners Street, a plaque marks a home of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834), and at 97 Mortimer Street one commemorates Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916), the short-story writer who wrote as "Saki" and whose sharp, dark comedies remain among the best in English before he was killed on the Western Front.
Cleveland Street: Dickens, Morse, and a Hidden History
Running north to south through the middle of Fitzrovia, Cleveland Street carries some of the neighbourhood's most surprising plaques. At 22 Cleveland Street, a plaque records that Charles Dickens (1812-1870) lived here as a boy. Long before the workhouses and debtors' prisons of his novels, the young Dickens lived on this street, and the workhouse that stood nearby has been argued by some scholars to be a model for the one in Oliver Twist. For more on the novelist's London, see our guide to Charles Dickens's London.
Further along, at 141 Cleveland Street, a plaque marks where Samuel Morse (1791-1872) lived. Most people know Morse as the American inventor of the telegraph and the code that bears his name, but he came to London as a young man to train as a painter, and it was here, years before the telegraph, that he studied art. Fitzrovia has a way of collecting people in the years before they became famous for something else entirely.
The Scientists and Reformers of W1
Fitzrovia's plaques are not only artistic. The neighbourhood housed scientists, inventors, and social reformers whose work reached far beyond its streets.
At 56 Fitzroy Street, a plaque marks the home of Captain Matthew Flinders (1774-1814), the navigator who led the first circumnavigation of Australia and who championed the very name "Australia" for the continent he charted. Near Whitfield Street, a plaque records Marie Stopes (1880-1958), who opened Britain's first birth-control clinic and changed the lives of countless women, however controversial her wider views have since become. And at 94 Great Portland Street, a plaque commemorates David Edward Hughes (1831-1900), the inventor whose work on the microphone and the printing telegraph helped lay the foundations of modern communication.
Music has its place too. At 103 Great Portland Street, a plaque marks where the German composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) died while visiting London to conduct his opera Oberon, and at 27 Conway Street a plaque records the great New Orleans jazz musician Sidney Bechet (1897-1959), who lived in Fitzrovia during his years in Europe. From a Romantic opera composer to a jazz clarinettist, the neighbourhood's musical residents span the whole range.
Portland Place and Broadcasting House: The Home of British Radio
The western edge of Fitzrovia is marked by Portland Place, the grand avenue that runs up to Regent's Park, and at its southern end stands the BBC's Broadcasting House, opened in 1932. Around the building and its Radio Theatre is one of the most concentrated clusters of plaques in the neighbourhood, commemorating the comedians and broadcasters who made British radio.
The Radio Theatre plaques read like a cast list of twentieth-century comedy: Tony Hancock, Peter Sellers, Hattie Jacques, Sid James, Kenneth Horne, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, and Harry Secombe are all commemorated here, the voices of Hancock's Half Hour, The Goon Show, and the programmes that millions gathered around the wireless to hear. Nearby, at 84 Hallam Street, a plaque marks a London home of the American broadcaster Edward R. Murrow (1908-1965), who reported the Blitz to the United States from London rooftops and whose broadcasts helped shape American sympathy for Britain during the war. A short detour brings you to the Diorama near Triton Square, where a plaque records the comic actor Kenneth Williams (1926-1988), born in the neighbourhood he never really left.
A Suggested Fitzrovia Walking Route
The plaques of Fitzrovia sit close enough together to make an easy afternoon's walk. Start at Fitzroy Square for Virginia Woolf, Roger Fry, and the Bloomsbury circle, then walk south down Fitzroy Street and Charlotte Street, past the painters and the Fitzroy Tavern that gave the area its name. Cut east to Cleveland Street for Dickens and Morse, then work your way west through Mortimer Street and Great Portland Street to the composers and inventors. Finish on Portland Place at Broadcasting House, where the comedians of British radio are gathered, before the avenue opens out toward Regent's Park.
It is a walk of perhaps two hours at an unhurried pace, and it crosses, in that short distance, the worlds of Bloomsbury literature, Victorian painting, modern science, and the golden age of radio. Fitzrovia is small, but few neighbourhoods in London reward a slow walk and a careful eye more richly.
If you want to find these plaques as you walk, and keep a record of the ones you have visited, Legacy maps every blue plaque in Fitzrovia and across London, turning an afternoon's stroll into a collection you build over time. You can explore the neighbourhoods next door in our guides to Marylebone's blue plaques and Mayfair's blue plaques, and trace the circle that began on Fitzroy Square in our guide to the Bloomsbury Group. Wherever you start, Fitzrovia proves that the most interesting square mile in London is often the one nobody thinks to look at.