Tavistock Square is a public square in Bloomsbury, in the London Borough of Camden.
History
Tavistock Square was built in the 1820s by the property developer James Burton and the master builder Thomas Cubitt for Francis Russell, 5th Duke of Bedford, and formed part of the Bedford Estate in London (…). The square takes its name from Francis Russell, Marquess of Tavistock, whose title dates to 1694 when his ancestor was Lord Lieutenant of Tavistock, a market town in Devon, also part of a Bedford estate. (…)
In 1920 the Tavistock Clinic was founded in the square, a pioneering psychiatric clinic whose patients included shell-shock victims of the First World War. In 1946 the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations separated from the Tavistock Clinic. The Tavistock Clinic has since moved to Hampstead and the Tavistock Institute to Islington. (…)
Tavistock Square was the scene of one of the four suicide bombings on 7 July 2005 (…), immediately outside the British Medical Association House, many of BMA staff came out to give what help they could.
Public art
- The centre-piece of the gardens is a statue of Mahatma Gandhi, sculpted by Fredda Brilliant and installed in 1968. (…)
- A cherry tree was planted in 1967 in memory of the victims of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
- A generation later, in 1994, the Conscientious Objectors Commemorative Stone commemorating "men and women conscientious objectors all over the world and in every age" by Hugh Court was unveiled.
These three features have led to the square unofficially being regarded by some as a peace park or garden, and annual ceremonies are held at each of these memorials.
- A bust of the writer Virginia Woolf, cast from a 1931 sculpture by Stephen Tomlin (1901–1937), was unveiled in 2004 at the southwest corner of the square. Woolf lived at 52 Tavistock Square between 1924 and 1939. From there she and her husband Leonard Woolf ran the Hogarth Press, which became a prominent and influential publisher at the forefront of modernist fiction and poetry (publishing T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster and Katherine Mansfield among others) and translating the works of Sigmund Freud into English. Their house was destroyed by a bomb in October 1941 during the London Blitz. The south side of the square where Woolf lived is now occupied by a hotel.
- The square contains a memorial to the surgeon Dame Louisa Aldrich-Blake (1865–1925) - Louisa Aldrich-Blake's monument-, with a bust of Aldrich-Blake by Arthur George Walker on a plinth designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens.
Buildings
The following buildings are on Tavistock Square:
- Tavistock House, home of James Burton while he developed the area and then of Charles Dickens. A blue plaque on BMA House commemorates him. Subsequently it was demolished in 1901 and replaced by "British Medical Association House", designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens in 1911 and is a grade II listed building. It is the headquarters of the British Medical Association (BMA), the professional association of doctors in the United Kingdom.
- The headquarters of the Medical Schools Council, an organisation which represents the interests and ambitions of UK medical schools as they relate to the generation of national health, wealth and knowledge through biomedical research and the profession of medicine.
- Woburn house, the headquarters of Universities UK, the conference of university rectors
- the Tavistock Hotel, a branch of Imperial Hotels.
- Connaught Hall, a University of London hall of residence (…)
- Institute for the Study of the Americas, part of the University of London's School of Advanced Study
- School of Public Policy of University College London.
- London office of Churches Together in England
- Commonwealth Scholarship and Fellowship Plan, United Kingdom office
- Development Planning Unit, University College of London
- Photos and main text by Davide Norata (June 2017)
- Locate the item on this Google Map