Plaques, paperbacks and a late ticket: the thinking person's evening in WC1

A district that writes everything down

Few parts of London are as thoroughly written about, or as thoroughly written in, as Bloomsbury. The British Museum and its old circular Reading Room drew scholars and novelists for a century and a half. The University of London grew up around the squares. Publishers took the tall Georgian houses because they were cheap, central and full of light, and for decades the neighbourhood's front rooms held more manuscripts than furniture. Walk its streets with your eyes a little above head height and the blue plaques come thick and fast.

That makes it the best district in central London for a date with some thinking in it. Nothing here is loud, the distances are short, and every corner has a story to pass back and forth. Start around five, when the light is still good, and the whole route takes you from a bookshop counter to a late ticket and a table without ever needing a taxi.

Opening pages: Bury Place and the museum streets

Begin a street away from the British Museum at the London Review Bookshop on Bury Place, opened in 2003 by the literary magazine of the same name. It is the sort of shop where every table has clearly been chosen by somebody who has read the books on it, and where twenty minutes of browsing produces a better conversation than twenty minutes of small talk. Next door, the shop's own cake shop does tea and something sweet for anyone who has come straight from a meeting.

From there, the streets around the museum are lined with dealers in antiquarian books, prints and maps, their windows full of old engravings and first editions. Even with the shops closing, the windows are worth reading, and they give the walk its first detours.

Front doors with famous names behind them

Cross Russell Square and look for number 24, where a plaque records that T. S. Eliot worked there for Faber and Faber, the firm he joined in 1925 and served for the rest of his life. A few minutes north, Gordon Square is where the four Stephen siblings, Virginia and Vanessa among them, set up house in 1904 and began the Thursday evenings that became the Bloomsbury Group. Their neighbours and friends soon filled the square: Lytton Strachey at number 51, and later the economist John Maynard Keynes at number 46.

In Tavistock Square, a bronze bust of Virginia Woolf marks the square where she and Leonard lived from 1924 until 1939, running the Hogarth Press from the basement; the house itself was destroyed in the Blitz. Beside the square, the headquarters of the British Medical Association stands on the site of Tavistock House, where Dickens lived through much of the 1850s.

Then slip into Woburn Walk, a tiny pedestrian street of bow fronted shops laid out in the 1820s, where W. B. Yeats lived at number 5 for more than twenty years and held Monday evenings of his own. It is one of the prettiest corners of London, and at dusk, with the shop windows lit, it looks exactly like the setting of a novel.

Doughty Street, and a basement full of books

Head east across the district to Doughty Street, a broad Georgian terrace where the Charles Dickens Museum occupies number 48. It is the only one of Dickens's London homes still standing, and he wrote Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickleby while living there with his growing family in the late 1830s. The rooms are furnished as he would have known them, and the museum holds occasional evening openings; details are on its website.

On the way, the Brunswick Centre hides Skoob Books in its basement, a sprawling second hand shop with a very deep stock, where the only sound is pages turning. It is the right place to set a small challenge: ten minutes each, one book chosen for the other, exchanged over the first drink of the evening.

Buying the late ticket

Several of the district's museums and libraries open into the evening on particular nights, and a late ticket turns the walk into an event. The British Museum opens selected galleries on some evenings; the British Library on the Euston Road runs talks, readings and exhibitions, and its Treasures gallery holds some of the most famous pages ever written; and the Wellcome Collection, a few doors along, runs evening events of its own and keeps a reading room upstairs that is one of the most beautiful quiet spaces in London.

Programmes change with the season, so book before you set out. Talks and special openings are often sold out days ahead, and the best of them are worth planning a whole evening around.

Where the conversation goes afterwards

After a talk or a late gallery, the Coral Room at WC1B 3NN on Great Russell Street is the obvious next stop: a long, bright bar painted the colour of its name, busy enough to feel alive and quiet enough to hear yourself. For something older, the Museum Tavern across from the British Museum gates has served readers and researchers for generations, and The Lamb on Lamb's Conduit Street keeps its Victorian screens and its long association with the writers who lived nearby.

Dinner is best kept close. The small restaurants of Lamb's Conduit Street and the streets around Marchmont Street are a few minutes away, and a hotel dining room in Holborn is ten minutes south.

Readers on the call sheet

Liana reads French novels slowly and for pleasure, has a bookshop in this district she cannot walk past and is at her best on a calm weeknight. Patricia, whose auburn hair is usually bent over a low shelf, loses whole afternoons in second hand shops and will find the one book you did not know you wanted. Margo, in her thirties and quietly well read, loves the reading room at the Wellcome and speaks about contemporary art with real authority. Violetta reads far more than she ever lets on and makes an excellent, dry companion for a talk.

Three hours at £700 covers the bookshops, the plaques and a late ticket. Four hours, the dinner date at £900, adds a table afterwards. For an evening with no fixed agenda, the relaxed unscripted evening suits the district perfectly. The streets are mapped on the Bloomsbury and Euston pages, with a price for each length listed under rates.