ONE HUNDRED and fifty events come together this weekend to make up the Bloomsbury Festival, a wide-ranging celebration of the area’s famous attachment to art, culture and death.


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The grim reaper turns up in the Tour of the Tombs, an intriguing guided walk through St George’s Gardens, which was a cemetery until mid-Victorian times and so quite likely to have entered the imagination of Charles Dickens.

The Charles Dickens Museum is closed for a big revamp at the moment, but that hasn’t stopped it joining in the festival fun. Exhibits from the museum will be on show on Russell Square – the centre point of the festival – where there’s also the chance to have a family photograph taken in Victorian style.

For a different kind of literary experience, there’s the Cartoon Museum on Little Russell Street, which covers cartoons from Hogarth’s to Dennis the Menace and is opening its doors for free to bearers of the festival programme. Normally, entry costs £5.

The Bloomsbury Festival runs from Friday 19 – Sunday 21 October.