Where to Stay in Somerville, Massachusetts

What is Somerville known for?

Somerville fits its whole street grid into under eleven square kilometres of Middlesex County, which makes it the densest municipality in New England and gives the place a walking scale its larger neighbours cannot match. Tufts University holds one edge. The campus runs along the border Somerville shares with Medford, while the city itself lies northwest of Boston and north of Cambridge, near enough that the Harvard Art Museums and the Museum of Science count as ordinary afternoon outings.

What are the main landmarks in Somerville?

The landmark list runs past the city boundary. The Sean Collier Memorial, the Margaret Fuller House, the Maria Baldwin House, the Percy W. Bridgman House and the William M. Davis House each attach to a person rather than to an institution. Museums crowd the same ground.

The Harvard Art Museums, the Fogg Museum, the Busch-Reisinger Museum, the Harvard Museum of Natural History and the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology stand within reach of a Somerville room, while the Bunker Hill Monument and the USS Constitution Museum lie a little further off.

What is the history of Somerville?

Somerville began as part of Charlestown. Settlement on this ground dates from 1630, and for two centuries the land belonged administratively to its neighbour, with Christ Church, the Church of the New Jerusalem and North Avenue Congregational Church standing among the older institutional fabric in and around the modern city. Independence came in 1842.

The town was set off from Charlestown in that year, and everything municipal here, the wards and the squares and the government itself, dates from after that separation. The nineteenth century filled the grid. Houses recorded under the names of Margaret Fuller, Maria Baldwin, Percy W. Bridgman and William M. Davis mark the decades in which this corner of Middlesex County turned from open land into the densest street pattern in New England, and the Sacred Heart Church, Rectory, School and Convent shows how completely one parish could equip itself.

Tufts University arrived on the edge. Its campus follows the border with Medford, giving Somerville an academic frontage the city had not built for itself. Civic reputation came later still.

Somerville took the All-America City Award in 1972, again in 2009 and once more in 2015, and the Sean Collier Memorial belongs to the city's later memory.

Where is Somerville?

Somerville is small and packed. The city covers about eleven square kilometres of Middlesex County, lying northwest of Boston and north of Cambridge, which leaves it the densest municipality in New England by a wide margin. Borders do the framing.

Tufts University straddles the line with Medford, and the built fabric crosses every other boundary without a visible break, so a walker leaves this city by street sign rather than by any change underfoot.

What is the climate of Somerville?

Snow has nowhere to go here. Somerville lies in the temperate band of the northern hemisphere, so winter brings real accumulation, and in the densest municipality in New England every centimetre of it ends up banked along kerbs laid out for narrower centuries. Summer turns humid.

Streets packed this tight hold the day's heat well into the evening, and shade is worth choosing for on a July afternoon in Middlesex County.

How do you get to Somerville?

Boston and Cambridge do the arriving. Somerville keeps no terminal of its own, so travellers reach it through the larger cities it adjoins, and the final stage is short whichever of them a journey starts from. Then the city walks.

Eleven square kilometres of dense grid puts the Sean Collier Memorial, the Margaret Fuller House and the Tufts University frontage on the Medford border all within range of anyone without a car.