Setting the Scene

On a recent trip to London, I was compelled to make a pilgrimage to Russell Square in Bloomsbury. I should say that, although not a terribly exciting park in itself, it is surrounded by shops and hotels, and is a javelin-throw away from the British Museum (don’t try this), so it sits amid plenty of bustle. But the area surrounding this West End garden square is characteristically littered with trivia that could go unnoticed by some oblivious idiot who hasn’t happened to have picked up on the slightly uncommon frequency with which the name comes up time and again in the stories of luminous Londoners and their city. I’ll assume this is you, so allow me to explain.

Leo Szilard & the Nuclear Chain Reaction.

My initial conviction to see Russell Square in person came upon opening Richard Rhodes’ Making of the Atomic Bomb (not to be confused with the helpful manual How to Make an Atomic Bomb). The first sentence reads:

In London, where Southampton Row passes Russell Square, across from the British Museum in Bloomsbury, Leo Szilard waited irritably one gray Depression morning for the stoplight to change.

Though it’s not a habit of mine, having read the first sentence of this 800-page book I immediately closed it again and set it aside. My short attention span had bound me to search for this mystical intersection over Google Street View, would that I might imagine it better.

Actually, this isn’t wholly true. I had to read a bit further, as the historical weight of the intersection only becomes apparent at the end of Rhodes’ paragraph:

As he crossed the street time cracked open before him and he saw a way to the future, death into the world and all our woe, the shape of things to come.

A condensed version of the story is this: On the morning of September 12, 1933, Szilard read a summary of a speech on nuclear research given by Ernest Rutherford to the British Association, who denounced any hope of harnessing the Christ-melting potential energy within the atom as “moonshine,” which is Depression-speak for stupid and impossible. Szilard read this, possibly in the bathtub surrounded by scented candles, while a guest at the Imperial Hotel overlooking Russell Square.


Rutherford’s proclamation goaded him, and so the gears in Szilard’s head set to grind that morning on the subject of nuclear physics, in which he was something of an expert.

When he left the hotel on one of his regular thoughtful strolls, his feet took him across Southampton Row to Russell Square. As legend has it, by the time he got to the other side of the street, he had realised that if one atom, when hit by a neutron, ejected (say) two neutrons, each of which hit another atom, both in turn ejecting two more neutrons which go on to hit two other atoms etc., one might just sustain a nuclear chain reaction and release untold amounts of energy; none of this having occurred to common yokes like Lord Rutherford. Thus, nuclear energy was unofficially conceived, as were nuclear weapons and the profound change in the scale of human (ir)responsibilty which they signalled for all time.

Which story gives off a cultural aura that I wanted to witness firsthand. But while we’re on the subject, there happens to be a few additional tidbits on hand that make this area of London even more striking to the nerdish tastes:



George Orwell & The Ministry of Information.


Not precisely on Russell Square but towering a little ways behind it, you’ll see a great behemoth of a building known as The Senate House. Today it’s the nerve center of the University of London, but during World War II it housed the Ministry of Information, propaganda base for the war effort. The story goes that George Orwell’s wife worked here in the censorship department, redacting articles and controlling radio broadcasts (or whatever they do in censorship departments), and as a result George-o got something of an inside look at the machinery of state propaganda. Inevitably, this insight burrowed itself into his mind and cropped up in 1984 as the infamous Ministry of Truth. To a diehard Orwell fan this information alone is enough to justify a quick gander at the place, which is at any rate a decent example of monumental classicism in architecture if you were looking for one –a ‘dictatorial’ building style (Hitler and Stalin were fans). If you find this the least bit interesting, then prepare to look suspicious, as I did, wandering impatiently back and forth trying to take a sneaky photo without coming off as a tourist or a spy.

T.S. Eliot, Faber and Faber.

The North West corner of the garden at 24 Russell Square, again a London U. Building, was back in the day the HQ of the squishy literary teddy bear T.S. Eliot: critic and poet extraordinaire, Nobel Laureate (for what that’s worth), and mild anti-Semite. He worked here during his highly influential Faber & Faber editorial years, where he published the hell out of Auden, Spender, MacNiece, Joyce, Plath and not-so-mild anti-Semite Pound, to name a few. Incidentally, while at Faber he also rejected Orwell’s drafts for both Down and Out in Paris and London and Animal Farm, which his fine editor’s sense evidently decided were “unprintable shit-uscripts.”

Legend has it that Eliot would often sit out in the gardens at Russell Square to enjoy a cheeky fajita and Sunny D for lunch as he ruminated on the best way to exact his organ-shrivelling rejection on the heaps of submissions burying his desk, while looking sharp in a double-breasted suit and bowler. He even earned the name ‘Pope of Russell Square’ among the locals, though he may have originated the term for himself while drunkenly accosting passersby from up a tree in the early morning hours, wrapped in blankets and brandishing a heavy stick.

At least, he never said he didn't.

Virginia Woolf & The Bloomsbury Group.

Along the same lines as Eliot, though more bohemian and rad, the Bloomsbury Group had a house not on Russell Square –in fact on a different square altogether, about two steps away on Gordon Square. It’s not even Russell Square! you say. What a stretch! Am I that desperate? No: sit near Russell Square for a while in the early twentieth-century and I guarantee you Virginia Woolf, or E.M. Forster, or John Maynard Keynes, or Lytton Strachey, or some other eminent Bloomsburian will walk past, and may even ask you to stop drooling on the pavement. We are in Bloomsbury, and this was its artistic Group, some of whom lived here before moving away to rural Sussex near a town called Lewes where there’s a lovely place to have breakfast called Bill’s, go there if you’re in the area. But I digress. With all these associations floating around, it’s a mystery how Russell Square hasn’t become a magical mile-wide golden oak tree from all the cultural monoliths that have graced it with their seedlings of fertility.


And no doubt even more things have happened in and around Russell Square. In fact, on a serious note, it was a bus diverted down Southampton Row that carried one of the four 7 July 2005 bombs, another being on the Piccadilly line train running between here and King’s Cross. Not an uplifting association, to be sure, but one worth remembering as you point and smile at the place where the atomic bomb was practically incubated, the inspiration for Orwell’s dystopian total-propaganda machine towering starkly behind you.

... young Beatles loitering happily. A photo of them walking towards
Russell Square along Guilford Street is among their most famous.

It's a neat London area, so take a stroll there someday like Leo did and maybe you'll get an idea.

Some good info shamelessly lifted from here and here.