Park of the week

169. Russell Square

Russell Square is a large garden square in Bloomsbury, laid out in 1804. It’s named after the surname of the Earls and Dukes of Bedford (Russell is the family name), who developed the family's London landholdings in the 17th and 18th Centuries. It was designed by Humphry Repton. 

In the centre of the garden is a paved area, with three large, circular fountains (installed 1959-60). They no longer work and they’re topped by large concrete planters, but there is a working fountain in the middle. The fountains are surrounded by further planters and areas of bedding and roses are set in and around the paved area. Around the centre there are areas of lawn with trees (mostly planes), shrubberies and hedges. Over forty species of birds have been spotted there.

A cab shelter, originally built for the drivers of hansom cabs, still stands in the north-west corner. There’s also a café. 
Some buildings around the square bear plaques with information on earlier residents.

One plaque that should be there, but isn’t, would be on  the intersection where the road Southampton Row meets Russell Square. On the morning of September 12, 1933, Hungarian Jewish physicist (and friend of Einstein), Leo Szilard, waited to cross the road at this very traffic light, or more likely its thirties predecessor. Szilard had just attended a lecture by the physicist Ernest Rutherford  (known to many as the father of nuclear physics), who had said that the thought of releasing the energy locked in atoms was ‘moonshine’. Szilard was considering this and as he stepped off the kerb he was struck not by a car, but by the idea of a chain reaction between atoms that could release vast amounts of energy. This was  six years before the discovery of nuclear fission and of any idea that anyone could have had about the release of atomic energy.

I stopped there and drank in the atmosphere and the fumes as traffic and apparently oblivious pedestrians passed by. But, actually, Szilard probably wouldn’t have wanted a plaque. He became a pacifist after he’d worked out the  consequences of his own discovery and tried unsuccessfully during World War II to meet  President Truman to warn him of the inevitability of an arms race if America dropped the bomb. Just another junction, but the place where it could be said that the atomic bomb was born.

Judith Field

Russell Square, London WC1B 5EH