Bloomsbury

A London district that was cheap and unfashionable gave its name to a byword for highbrow.

Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, John Maynard Keynes, Lytton Strachey and their circle began meeting around 1905 in Bloomsbury, the area around the British Museum, then out of fashion and full of large, affordable houses. Bloomsberries is the jokey plural for them, punning on berries. The district's name goes back to Blemondisberi, the manor of William Blemond, who held the land in the early thirteenth century.