Friends help develop refugee history walk
'One of the reasons for doing the walk was to highlight archives and archival resources in the area, and of course Friends House was involved from the very beginning in 1933, and today you have a fabulous archive.’
The Library of the Society of Friends has partnered with Senate House Library to develop a London history walk about refugees.
The guided walk around Bloomsbury focuses on refugees who came to the area in the first half of the twentieth century.
The route, which has been offered to the public by Senate House Library, features local blue plaques that commemorate refugee groups who are ‘in danger of being forgotten’. These include the Basque children, and the Hungarian students who came to Bloomsbury after the second world war.
Katharina Hubschmann, project archivist at the Research Centre for German & Austrian Exile Studies (Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies), told the Friend: ‘Bloomsbury looms large in refugee history because pretty much all refugees from the Nazis at one time or another had to deal with the myriad refugee committees in the area, originally housed in Woburn House, from 1939 in Bloomsbury House. One of the reasons for doing the walk was to highlight archives and archival resources in the area, and of course Friends House was involved from the very beginning in 1933, and today you have a fabulous archive.’
She added: ‘Altogether we did six walks in November 2025: one for History Day, our official ones for the Being Human Festival, and one unofficial one the week after, where we just contacted people who had been on the waiting list.’
Senate House Library has also curated an online exhibition which can be used as the basis for a self-guided walk. According to the library, ‘The stories of the refugees told in this exhibition raise questions about how societies react to refugees – which are as pertinent today as they were a hundred years ago. This exhibition considers how and why some refugee groups have been more welcome than others; how refugee groups have been valued or denigrated; and how communities can help.’
This project was developed by Katharina Hubschmann, and Angharad Eyre, researcher at Senate House Library, with assistance from the Wiener Holocaust Library and Britain Yearly Meeting. The history walks featured in the Being Human Festivals in 2025 and 2020, which were led by the School of Advanced Study, University of London.
