The British Museum
The British Museum has the largest and most comprehensive collection of ancient Egyptian material outside of Cairo and illustrates every aspect of the culture, from the Neolithic period up to the Christian period, a time span of over 5,000 years. Egyptian objects have formed part of the collections of the Museum since its beginning in 1753. After the British defeated the French in 1801, a number of antiquities which the French had collected were confiscated by the army and presented to the Museum, the most famous of these being the Rosetta Stone.

When the stone was exhibited in the British Museum, it established the primacy of the Museum’s Egyptian collections, and it has remained the best known Egyptian antiquity in the Museum. The size of the Egyptian collections now stands at over 100,000 objects, and it will continue to increase over the years as new acquisitions are made from excavations and donations.

West Central London – Bloomsbury/The West End
Bloomsbury is the historically acknowledged heart of literary London. This mostly residential area just to the north of Covent Garden and east of Soho is home to the University of London, the Law Courts, the publishing house that first published Ulysees, the home of Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group, and the British Museum. At No. 48 Doughty Street, Charles Dickens House, visitors can view the desk where Oliver Twist was written. The Inns of Court remains the finest group of historical buildings in the city, the ghost of the Pre-Raphaelite group linger along Russell Square and the streets where early 19th century row-houses hide leafy back gardens and abut Coram’s Fields where no adults area allowed unless accompanied by children. Follow the gentle slope down Southampton Row, Drury Lane, or Shaftesbury, and you find yourself in the heart of the London theater district, with the teeming markets of Covent Garden just a few blocks away.

Bloomsbury has a rather mixed reputation in modern London; balancing the iconic literary, educational traditions of the past with the thriving business and tourist elements. It was until very recently the home of most of England’s great historical treasures: the Magna Carta and Guttenburg Bible now lie just to the north in the new British Library in St. Pancras, but the British Museum still holds the Elgin Marbles, the Rosetta Stone, and of course the largest collection of Egypt antiquities in the western world.

From the British Museum walk three blocks to the east along Great Russell Street and you hit Tottenham Court Road, the main north/south conduit in west London, crossed a block away by Oxford Street, the major east/west road. Head southwest from here into the grid of Soho, home to London’s frantic nightlife scene. After Oxford Tottenham Court changes to into Charing Cross Road to the south, and a few more blocks you will find yourself passing the carnival atmosphere of Leicester Square and arriving in Trafalgar Square, covered in a blanket of pigeons and home to Nelson’s Column, The National Portrait Museum, St. Martin in the Fields church, and arguably the tourist center of London.