What is the Bloomsbury Project?

The Leverhulme-funded UCL Bloomsbury Project was established to investigate 19th-century Bloomsbury’s development from swampy rubbish-dump to centre of intellectual life

Led by Professor Rosemary Ashton, with Dr Deborah Colville as Researcher, the Project has traced the origins, Bloomsbury locations, and reforming significance of hundreds of progressive and innovative institutions

Many of the extensive archival resources relating to these institutions have also been identified and examined by the Project, and Bloomsbury’s developing streets and squares have been mapped and described

This website is a gateway to the information gathered and edited by Project members during the Project’s lifetime, 1 October 2007–30 April 2011, with the co-operation of Bloomsbury’s institutions, societies, and local residents

Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project

Cartoon satirising the British College of Health

Bloomsbury Institutions

Bloomsbury Streets, Squares, and Buildings

Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project

George Darby Dermott (1801/1802–1847)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was an anatomist and surgeon, who had campaigned for voluntary donation of bodies for dissection

He tried to established a fund for this via the Lancet in 1828, and again in 1832 after the enactment of the Anatomy Act

He was also involved with Thomas Wakley’s campaign to start a democratic London College of Medicine (Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London, 1989)

He ran the Charlotte Street School of Medicine; Desmond calls him “the hard-drinking teacher George Dermott” (Adrian Desmond, The Politics of Evolution: Morphology, Medicine, and Reform in Radical London, 1989)