Our Ethos

Tucked into the heart of London, in the Bloomsbury Quarter, high art and an impressive literary history sit alongside a multicultural residential area, international businesses, a host of shops and restaurants, numerous institutions of national importance, and not a few drinking establishments. Hiding in amongst these are some of the world’s greatest creative organisations, and copious highly regarded individual artists.

In an era when it is increasingly unusual to be involved with a particular area, the Bloomsbury Festival is an area-specific celebration which encourages the people who live, work and study within this unique and varied part of London to explore each others’ interests and enjoy themselves together.

Through a wide range of partnerships which encompass businesses, artists, schools and hospitals, craftsmen, musicians, retailers, museums, galleries and charities, the Festival offers opportunities for people within Bloomsbury to work together and have fun, while discovering the range of remarkable activity that the area continues to produce today.

The Bloomsbury Quarter has always been an area in which well known artists and craftsmen have taken an active role in their local community. In the Eighteenth Century, the artist William Hogarth and the composer Frederick Handel played key roles in establishing London’s first home for abandoned children, The Foundling Hospital, located on the site of Coram’s Fields. In the mid nineteenth century, Doughty Street was home to the writer Charles Dickens, a famous social reformer, and in the late nineteenth century an innovative group of Victorian artists, including William Morris, established the Art Workers’ Guild on Queen’s Square, which attracted a distinguished membership including most of the prominent younger architects, painters, sculptors and designers of the period. Guild members were prominent in the reform of art education in the 1890s, setting up schools, and designing buildings for public education, such as Mary Ward House. The Guild emphasised 'learning by doing', challenging the class distinction between 'gentleman' designers and tradesmen.

Today, the Festival aims to continue this egalitarian local focus. With almost all its events and courses free, and funded entirely by local sponsorship, the Bloomsbury Festival aims to create a local network that is cross-disciplinary, and celebrates every aspect of life in this unique neighbourhood.

The area is still a training ground for a new generation of artists, architects and designers, and the Festival aims to showcase work that is made by people in the area, or by people with an interest in the area. It is led by Allied London, the re-developer of The Brunswick, who sponsored the first Festival in its entirety, and continue to be the headline sponsor in 2007.