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

William Morris (1834–1896)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

His family owned shares in the Great Consul Copper Mines down on Bedford estate lands near Tavistock, Devon

He lived at (old no.) 41 Great Ormond Street until 1859

He also lectured in Great Ormond Street, at the Working Men's College

He founded The Firm in 1861, with workshops at 8 Red Lion Square

He lived at no. 26 Queen Square until 1872 over the offices and workshop of his Firm, which remained there from 1865 to 1881

He was the founder in 1877 of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, which met first in Queen Square and later moved to Great Ormond Street

The British Museum features in his utopian romance News from Nowhere

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