IF YOU dream of ditching the daily commute for a pad in Central London, take heart. You don’t have to be a sheikh or an oligarch to buy in Bloomsbury, where a studio flat a short walk from Covent Garden and graceful garden squares can be had for under £200,000. But you do have to be quick.
Until very recently the neat rectangle bordered by Euston Road, Gray’s Inn Road, New Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road was decidedly down on its luck. The elegantly proportioned streets and squares laid out in the 18th century by the 4th Duke of Bedford (whose descendants still own much of the land) are home to a rich literary heritage, with residents ranging from Dickens and Darwin to George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf. However, with the dispersal of the Bloomsbury set the area was gradually abandoned for the suburbs, and elegant Georgian salons were divided into office cubicles for accountants. Russell Square became a seedy gay cruising ground, and the brutalist concrete Brunswick Centre, built as an idealistic housing experiment in the 1960s, became a byword for social exclusion.
However, Bloomsbury is now, according to Mark de Rivaz, steward of the Bedford Estate, “pulling itself up by its bootstraps”. The man who has run the present duke’s 200 commercial and residential properties for the past 15 years is full of praise for Camden council: “They have cleaned the place up, the traffic is better managed and the open spaces are well kept. Russell, Bloomsbury and Bedford squares have been very much smartened up”.
The impressively grim Brunswick Centre was bought in 1998 from Camden council by the property developers Allied London, which has spent £24 million giving the flats a lick of paint and redesigning the central shopping centre round the arthouse Renoir Cinema. It now looks light, airy and smart. Bloomsbury has long lacked decent shops, but it now boasts the bright shopfronts of Hobbs, Space NK, Office, Coast, French Connection, LK Bennett, Benetton, Carluccio’s, Yo Sushi and a vast Waitrose.
Shoppers in Office, which opened four days before I visited (the majority of premises opened to the public last Saturday), were enthusiastic: “I worked round here in 1985 and it used to be pretty sad. Now I think they’ve used the space well and the shops look good,” said Wendy Law. Business has been excellent, according to the branch supervisor, Anna Pascullo. In a sure sign of gentrification, London Farmers’ Markets has opened an office in the centre and held the area’s first market last Saturday.
De Rivaz describes the redevelopment as a fantastic asset for the area. Trevor Banbury, of the local estate agents Banbury Ball, confirms that the project has also had a direct effect on house prices in the centre. “Before work started we rarely had flats for sale, and they went for £320,000 for a two-bed,” he says. “But we’ve already sold two this year for £420,000.” The price increase is part of a general trend. When Banbury opened his office in 1994, flats in Russell Court, a huge 1930s mansion block on Woburn Place, sold for £45,000 “if you were lucky”. “Then from 1996 it started picking up. Flats that would have taken 15 viewings to sell soon had waiting lists, and sellers were getting their asking price or over. We’re still behind Clerkenwell, Covent Garden and Fitzrovia, though we’re catching up. Fitzrovia is probably still 20 per cent more expensive,” he says. Since January alone, Banbury estimates prices have risen by 22 per cent.
It’s not just the Brunswick Centre that is fuelling the boom. Vast swaths of King’s Cross, on Bloomsbury’s northern border, once notorious for prostitution, are being turned into flats. St Pancras, the towering Victorian fantasy next door, is to house the Eurostar link from next autumn. Fifty million people a year are expected to use the station, and a 67-acre area next door is being transformed into a Brunswick-esque shopping district. “
Local people we’ve spoken to have said the area lacks somewhere to go after work,” says Mike Luddy, the project director, “so we’ll have a world-class restaurant, Europe’s longest champagne bar, a gastro-pub and lots of high-quality, independent retailers. There will be no McDonald’s.”
The rest of the vast building is being transformed by the Manhattan Loft Corporation into a Marriott hotel and 67 flats, all of which sold off-plan within one week last year, according to Adrian Owen at Hamptons estate agents. Prices ranged from £495,000 to £5 million — “60 per cent in excess of property values in the area”. Residents will be able to order room service from the hotel downstairs.
All this is really just the icing on the cake, because Bloomsbury is already one of the most beautiful and best-connected areas of Central London. There are eight Tube stations within easy walking distance, as well as national and international links from King’s Cross, St Pancras and Euston. If you live here you rarely need to take a taxi. The myriad shops, bars, theatres and restaurants of Covent Garden and Soho are on your doorstep and the City is a five-minute Tube ride away. The British Museum adds a touch of class and, apart from the many garden squares, there are two public parks: St George’s Gardens, a 300-year-old former cemetery, and Coram’s Fields, a nineacre playground for local children.
Available property ranges from £180,000 studios in mansion blocks such as Russell Court to the grand Georgian townhouses in the area around Great Ormond Street and Lamb’s Conduit Street. Trevor Banbury recently sold a five-bedroom house on Doughty Street for £2.6 million, “which is about half what you’d pay in Chelsea”. The serious money is being spent in Bedford Square, where earlier this year a single developer bought the entire south side from the Crown Estate for more than £50 million and is converting many properties back to houses.
Here your neighbours might be local celebrities such as Damien Hirst or Ricky Gervais, but a preponderance of hospitals and University of London buildings means that most residents are doctors, academics, or former students whose parents were far-sighted enough to invest a few years ago.
I can’t think of a nicer place to live than the bustling area around Lamb’s Conduit Street, a pedestrianised community of independent bookshops, wine merchants, pubs and cafés. Maggie Owen, the owner of French’s Dairy, a new jewellery boutique on Rugby Street, gushes that Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes had their wedding night at number 18 and that Rupert Everett has just moved in round the corner. The barman in the Perseverance gastro-pub, Omar Karim, says the area has become so residential that they are having to tone down their fortnightly live music performances. An organic delicatessen and a salon offering Botox completes the fashionable picture.
And yet Bloomsbury is still reasonably priced for Central London. Adrian Owen, at Hamptons, emphasises that it is “much more affordable than the traditional middle-class ghettos of Clapham and Fulham, and much closer to the City”. He predicts that the area will enjoy a strong increase in popularity, and indeed, it seems inevitable. But for now, Bloomsbury remains a largely undiscovered gem, right in the middle of the action.
