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

Francis Henry Goldsmid (1808–1878)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was the son of Isaac Lyon Goldsmid and second baronet after his father’s death in 1859

Like his father, he was a prominent reformer, closely associated with University College London and University College Hospital

In 1833 he became the first professing Jew to be allowed to take his oath as a barrister on the Hebrew Bible, and in 1858 the first to be appointed Queen’s Counsel (Oxford Dictionary of Biography)

Together with his father and some other Jews he established the reforming West London Synagogue of British Jews, which opened in January 1842 in Burton Street

Francis took over from his father as Treasurer of University College Hospital in 1850 (‘A Short History of the Hospital’, The University College Gazette, vol. I, 1 October 1886, UCL Special Collections)

In 1871 he endowed a Chair of Mathematics and Mechanics at University College (H. Hale Bellot, University College London 1826–1926, 1929)

On his death in 1878 Goldsmid left the largest bequest University College had ever received, of £40,000 to the College and £10,000 to the Hospital (‘A Short History of the College’, The University College Gazette, vol. I, 17 December 1886)

For more general biographical information about Francis Henry Goldsmid, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography