Members from award-winning writers’ group 26 are attending festival events daily to write creatively, engagingly and objectively about everything they see going on around them. A different writer will attend and observe events each day, to think and write, to provide a personal viewpoint on what is happening day by day.

FREE online event – published daily throughout the festival at bloomsburyfestival.org.uk

From serenity to ecstasy, contentment to awe, happiness encompasses many different positive feelings. What it means to be happy has preoccupied thinkers throughout history, and each of us has our own ways of feeling good.

On Happiness is a season of free events, activities and two exhibitions – Joy and Tranquillity – which celebrate the complexity of positive emotions and invite you to explore the big questions. What links our emotional and physical health? How have people, today and in the past, tried to experience happiness? Who gets to define what makes a ‘happy life’ and why? And in difficult times can joy help us navigate adversity?

At Wellcome Collection and online, enjoy multi-sensory artworks and historic artefacts, and see how cultural, scientific and spiritual perspectives on happiness compare with your own point of view. On Happiness offers an opportunity to rethink and reclaim happiness for our world today.

FREE at www.welcomecollection.org

A virtual stroll around some of the leafy garden squares in Bloomsbury with local resident Griff Rhys Jones.

On one of the hottest days of the year, Griff took advantage of the leafy green shade offered by the majestic plane trees to explore a route through the gardens and discover their individual characters and interesting features.

The Association of Bloomsbury Squares and Gardens is a forum for the Friends groups of the different gardens and the volunteers work to care for them in a variety of ways, with added personal benefits in physical and mental health as a result of getting out into ‘nature in the city’.

This walk is presented by The Association of Bloomsbury Squares and Gardens as a celebration of these historic green spaces, a model for garden squares throughout the world, and hope it may encourage you to become involved too.

FREE online event – available throughout the Festival

Bloomsbury has long attracted artistic talent. It is home to the Slade, one of Britain’s greatest art schools in UCL, itself a monument to British Hellenism. In this online tour, Richard Cohen will show you works by Jacob Epstein, Paula Rego & Rex Whistler and some of the great treasures housed within University College. We will visit the homes of the great writers, artists and intellectuals of the Bloomsbury Group and see its famous squares, cradles of creative energy nurturing the genius of artists such as Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant and Roger Fry. You will look at a modern hotel recreated as a gorgeous tribute to the artistic ideals and designs of the Omega Workshop.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

Image: “Duncan Grant mural, West Wall (detail), St Blaise Chapel, Lincoln Cathedral, Lincoln, Lincolnshire, England” by Spencer Means is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

Chris Foster has a love of the old part of the Kings Cross area, south of Euston Road, where he was a Bobby on the Beat fifty years ago. He has developed his own unique walk through the back streets and then created an illustrated online version. Chris will not only entertain you with many historical facts, but will also add plenty of personal memories from his policing days, starting off with the immortal words “You will never guess what happened on this street corner…”.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

Mario Mieli, author of the influential Elements of a Homosexual Critique, was an Italian activist who joined the London Gay Liberation Front (GLF) in 1971 before founding the Italian gay liberation movement FUORI!. Undone Theatre’s Gabriele Uboldi has collected testimonies of Mieli’s time with the GLF to create a digital map of queer London, where the personal and the political, the present and the past merge into one.

Inspired by locations that were key to Mieli’s political journey, London/Londra: Invisible City is a collection of site-specific fragments mapping a personal topography of London. In this audio extract, Uboldi reflects on his own experience of migration as a queer Italian, exploring what it means to uncover the signs of an LGBT+ London that is too often made invisible.

Gabriele Uboldi is co-founder and artistic director of Undone Theatre, a London-based theatre company interested in experimenting with different forms of storytelling and undoing classical narratives, with a special focus on queer perspectives.

FREE online event – tune into Bloomsbury Radio

Join an online talk on the activities of German anti-Nazi activists in 1930s Bloomsbury by Professor Charmian Brinson of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies at the Institute of Modern Languages Research. The deaths of two German Socialist exiles, Dora Fabian and Mathilde Wurm, at 12 Great Ormond Street in 1935, in far from straightforward circumstances, were a cause célèbre of their day.

They were of particular concern to the German exile community in Britain and elsewhere, and to the British intellectual left, who feared not only that National Socialist agents might have been involved but also that the British authorities were intent on blocking the case’s thorough investigation. Setting the Fabian-Wurm affair in its context, the talk will trace the lives and careers of the two dead women and also examine the position of the earliest political exiles from Germany, many of whom were based in Bloomsbury.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential

Young Voices is a small curating project programmed by Screen Media with Curating and Film Programming & Curating MA students at Birkbeck, University of London. The programme presents refreshing essayistic work made by young filmmakers (16-22 years old) from the University of Pittsburgh, the Pittsburgh-London Film Program with Derek Jarman Lab, and essay films made for the Making Images course held at the Phoenix Cinema.

The Young Voices event will present a collection of powerful and unseen essay films exploring every day life and creativity in a post-Covid world. Often finding the beauty in the mundane, the films presented combine the personal with the universal through visual experiments and the use of found footage. The screenings will be followed by a Q+A and discussion with the young filmmakers and there will also be special guests.

The event will be hosted via Birkbeck’s Institute of the Moving Image digital platform.

FREE – but pre-booking is essential