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

Duncan Forbes (1798–1868)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was a Scottish-born scholar and Professor of Oriental Languages at King’s College London from 1837 to 1861

He was later employed by the British Museum to catalogue its Persian manuscripts

Worked with John Borthwick Gilchrist and subsequently Sandford Arnot at the London Oriental Institution in South Crescent

He was living at 8 Alfred Place at the time of the 1841 census and 58 Burton Crescent by the 1851 census; the latter address is where he died in 1868 (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography)

For more general biographical information about Duncan Forbes, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography