Bedford Square and the Bloomsbury Squares

Published 28 September 2026 · Updated 9 November 2026 · By the Guide to London editorial team · Editor: Terje Moy

Bedford Square is locked. It is a private garden belonging to the Bedford Estates, and the only way in is a key, which costs a Bloomsbury resident £125 plus VAT a year and has a waiting list. Every other square worth walking to is free and open from 7.30am, and one of them, Russell Square, stays open until 10pm all year.

Bloomsbury has ten garden squares, by the Bedford Estates' own count, packed into a walk of about twenty minutes end to end. They were laid out between the 1660s and the 1820s as the private amenity of the terraces around them, and the crucial thing for a visitor is that some are still run that way and some were handed to the London Borough of Camden. You cannot tell which from the outside, because they all have railings.

Our guides to Bloomsbury and to staying in Bloomsbury cover the district and the hotels. This page answers the narrow question: which gates are open, at what hour, and in what order to walk them.

Bedford Square is private, and this is what a key costs

The Bedford Estates, which still owns much of Bloomsbury, states the position plainly on its own site: some of the squares, like Russell Square, are open to the public, and others, such as Bedford Square, are private spaces.

The keyholder scheme is open to Bloomsbury residents and businesses with a WC1 postcode. For a resident the charge is £125 plus VAT a year; business rates vary and start from £750 plus VAT. Subscriptions run from March to March and are not divided up for part-years, and the estate says there is currently a waiting list for keys. If you do not live or work in WC1, none of that applies to you at any price.

There are two other ways in. The garden is hired out for events at £5,500 a day and holds up to 600 guests, which is how most people who are not keyholders have found themselves inside it. And it has appeared in London Open Gardens, the June weekend when private London squares open on one ticket; that is the realistic route for a visitor, and it needs planning months ahead.

The closing times Camden actually publishes

Camden does not close its gardens at dusk, and it does not use fortnights either. It publishes a list of named Mondays on which the closing time changes, and that list is the only reliable guide. The 2026 version runs like this.

Two things follow. From 23 November the gardens shut at four in the afternoon, which in practice means they are locked before dark and well before most people finish work, so a late-November evening in Bloomsbury happens on the pavement. And the steps are sharp: between 7 September and 12 October the closing time drops by an hour and a half in five weeks.

Opening is 7.30am under the byelaws, with Russell Square and St Pancras Gardens opening at 7am. Camden's borough has a different calendar from Westminster's next door, so if you are walking from Soho Square to Bloomsbury on an autumn evening you cross a boundary where the closing times change.

Russell Square, and why it is open until ten

Russell Square is the one exception in the borough, and the exception is generous: it closes at 10pm, every day of the year, whatever the season. Nowhere else in Camden does that, and there is very little else in central London that does either.

It is also the largest of the Bloomsbury squares at two and a half hectares, and it was designed and built in 1806 by Humphry Repton for the 5th Duke of Bedford. A Heritage Lottery Fund restoration stripped out some cosmetic alterations made in the 1960s and added the central plaza and water feature you see now. There is a café, and the square sits three or four minutes' walk from the British Museum.

For a visitor that combination, open until ten and a bench beside a fountain, is the most useful fact on this page. If you are staying in a Bloomsbury hotel and want somewhere green to sit after dinner in October, this is the only square whose gate will still be open.

Six squares in fifty minutes

This route goes south to north and then east. It takes in the six best, skips the university squares that are mostly buildings, and ends somewhere unexpected.

1. Bloomsbury Square (5 minutes). The southernmost, a suntrap surrounded by Georgian terraces and the bulk of Victoria House, with a children's play area. Statues of politicians face each other along Bedford Place at the north end, which is your route out.
2. Bedford Square (5 minutes, from the pavement). Straight up Bedford Place. Locked, Grade I on three sides, and the best thing to look at in Bloomsbury.
3. Gordon Square (8 minutes). West along the north side, then up Gower Street past University College London and right into Gordon Square. This one is not on Camden's own list of its parks, and its hours are posted at the gate rather than set by the council's calendar, so read the sign rather than assuming Camden's timetable applies.
4. Tavistock Square (8 minutes). One street east. The statue of Gandhi is in the middle; a tree commemorates the victims of Hiroshima; there is a memorial stone to conscientious objectors; and in one corner is a stone bench commemorating Dame Louisa Aldrich-Blake, one of the first women surgeons. Open from 7.30am to dusk.
5. Brunswick Square (10 minutes). East across Woburn Place and down Bernard Street. Overlooked by the concrete of the Brunswick Centre, and holding what Camden calls the finest London plane tree in the borough, listed as one of the Great Trees of London. Coram's Fields and the Foundling Museum are round the corner.
6. St George's Gardens (10 minutes). North up Hunter Street to Wakefield Street. See below; this is the one people do not expect.

Fifty minutes of walking, and a good deal more if you sit down, which you should. If you want to extend it, Lamb's Conduit Street is five minutes south of St George's Gardens and King's Cross is fifteen minutes north.

Which of them the nation thinks are important

Historic England keeps a separate register for designed landscapes, and it is a better guide to quality than the guidebooks. In Bloomsbury the entries are:

Two things in that table are worth arguing with. Gordon Square and Tavistock Square, which most people would put among the best, are not on the register at all. And the two highest-graded sites in Bloomsbury are the one you cannot enter and an old burial ground most visitors have never heard of.

St George's Gardens, the surprise at the end

Wakefield Street, WC1H 8HZ, open from 7.30am to dusk, free. It looks like a small wooded park with large trees and benches, and it is full of ivy-covered tombs and gravestones, because that is what it is.

Camden's own description gives it a distinction worth repeating: it was the first burial ground in London not attached to its own church. It is made up of two former grounds, belonging to St George the Martyr in Holborn and St George's Bloomsbury, and the renovated Chapel of Ease in it is now a meeting place. The restoration was supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund.

It is quieter than every other square on this walk, shaded in summer, and the right place to finish because nothing in it requires you to keep moving. If burial grounds turned into gardens appeal, our page on the Magnificent Seven cemeteries is the next step, and the Charles Dickens Museum is eight minutes away on Doughty Street.

What goes wrong

Three things, in order of how often they happen.

You arrive at Bedford Square expecting a garden. Everything written about Bloomsbury praises it and almost nothing says the gate is locked. Look at the buildings, not the lawn, and do not walk there specially in the dark.

You arrive at half past four in November. From 23 November 2026 the gates close at 4pm, so an afternoon that starts with the British Museum at two will find every square except Russell Square locked by the time you leave.

You assume they are all the same. Gordon Square keeps its own hours, Coram's Fields is run by a children's charity and will not admit an adult without a child, and Bedford Square is private. Reading the sign at each gate takes five seconds and saves the walk.

If you are arriving in the area with a suitcase before check-in, our page on luggage on the Tube explains why you should not be carrying it round six squares, and if the squares are locked, free things to do in London has a day's worth of alternatives. The other great cluster of London garden squares is in Mayfair; our page on Berkeley Square and the Mayfair squares covers those.

Frequently asked questions

Can you go into Bedford Square garden?

Not as a visitor. It is a private garden owned by the Bedford Estates, open to keyholders, who must be Bloomsbury residents or businesses with a WC1 postcode. Residents pay £125 plus VAT a year and there is a waiting list. It has opened for the London Open Gardens weekend in June, which is the only practical route in.

Which Bloomsbury squares are open to the public?

Russell Square, Bloomsbury Square, Tavistock Square, Brunswick Square and St George's Gardens are all free and open daily. Gordon Square is open but keeps its own hours, posted at the gate. Bedford Square is private, and Coram's Fields admits adults only in the company of a child.

What time do the Bloomsbury squares close?

Camden changes the closing time on named Mondays through the year, from 4pm in late November to 9.30pm from the start of June. In autumn 2026 it was 6.30pm from 28 September, 6pm from 12 October and 5pm after the clocks went back on 25 October; it is 4.30pm from 2 November and 4pm from 23 November. Russell Square is the exception and closes at 10pm all year.

Which is the best Bloomsbury square?

Russell Square for a bench and a café, and because it is the only one open in the evening. Bedford Square for the architecture, from the pavement. St George's Gardens if you want quiet, large trees and something genuinely unusual, and it shares the top grade on the national register with Bedford Square.

Is there a park in Bloomsbury with a playground?

Bloomsbury Square has a children's play area, and Coram's Fields nearby is a charity-run park designed for children, where no adult may enter without one. Brunswick Square, next to Coram's Fields, is the pleasantest of the three for sitting down while children run about.

Sources

• London Borough of Camden - Park opening and closing times (checked September 2026)
• London Borough of Camden - Our busiest parks (checked September 2026)
• The Bedford Estates - Garden squares and the Bedford Square keyholder scheme (checked September 2026)
• Historic England - Bedford Square, registered park and garden 1000245 (checked September 2026)
• Historic England - St George's Gardens, registered park and garden 1000832 (checked September 2026)
• Historic England - Russell Square, registered park and garden 1000213 (checked September 2026)
• Historic England - Numbers 1-10 Bedford Square and attached railings, list entry 1272304 (checked September 2026)