Both our Great British Women and Women Doctors & Nurses walking tours take place in Bloomsbury. Women featuring in the former include Vera Brittain (who lived in Doughty Street just after the Great War), and also Louisa Twining, Angela Burdett-Coutts, Octavia Hill, Mary Shelley, Virginia Woolf, Florence Nightingale, Noor Inayat Khan, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Marie Stopes and many more.

The latter walk starts with a Victorian Charity Hospital for Women, across from which lived Mary Seacole. We then follow the story of Elizabeth Garrett-Anderson, seeing en-route the old hospital where she trained, the Hospital for Women which she founded and the amazing Victorian architecture of what was the London School of Medicine for Women, for which she worked. And in wonderful contrast, we pass the 21st century Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Wing of University College Hospital. We also see a Macmillan Nurses centre, a fine memorial to pioneering woman doctor Louisa Aldrich-Blake and the spot where doctors saved lives after a terrorist attack. And you’ll also hear how a woman passed herself off as a man in order to become a doctor and was in fact the first woman doctor, long before Miss Garrett! We also see Marie Stopes centres and the spot where a nurse became one of the few women to win the George Cross.

Shockingly there are only 12 statues of any kind to non royalty women in the whole of Greater London,. It’s not surprising that 3 of them are in beautiful Bloomsbury.