Esoteric London

President Hotel, Russell Square, London, WC1. Photo © Roger Dean, 2011

The Business of Pleasure – Edmund Yates, 1879:

There are few Londoners of the rising generation who know those ghastly streets [of the Russell Square neighbourhood], solemn and straight, where the daylight at the height of summer fades at four o’clock, and in winter only looks in for an hour about noon; where the houses, uniform in dirt and dinginess, in lack of paint on their window-sills, and in fulness of filth on their windows, stare confronting each other in twin-like similitude.

[In the summer of 1963 the President Hotel in the heart of Bloomsbury was home to the 'Fab Four'. It was also the location for a publicity shoot of them by the photographer Norman Parkinson. R.D.]