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

Bloomsbury Project conferences

The first Bloomsbury Project conference was held at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, Euston Road, on 26th June 2008

Speakers and their subjects, 2008

Deborah Colville, ‘ “But Where, Pray, is Russell Square?”: Mapping Bloomsbury and Putting Bloomsbury on the Map’ For an updated version of this paper, see ‘A Tale of Two Squares’ (opens in new window)

Rosemary Ashton, ‘From the SDUK to the Passmore Edwards Settlement: Widening Access to Education in Bloomsbury’ (opens in new window)

Negley Harte, ‘Who's Afraid of Gordon Square?’

Anne Hardy, ‘Medicine in Bloomsbury’

Tilli Tansey, ‘Making Physiology in Bloomsbury’

Charlotte Mitchell, ‘Women Undergraduates in UCL’s Faculty of Arts in the 1880s and 1890s’ (opens in new window)

Berry Chevasco, ‘ “Homes of Hope”: The Rescue and Reform of Bloomsbury’s Fallen Women’ (opens in new window)

Matt Ingleby, ‘Erasure and Preservation in Early Victorian Bloomsbury: Bulwer Lytton's What Will He Do With It? and the Politics of Improvement’ (opens in new window)

Felix von Reiswitz, ‘A Tale of Two Clinics: The Globulisation of Bloomsbury’

Tom Quick, ‘Educational Reform, the ‘Decline of Science’ and ‘Scientific’ Medicine at London’s New University c. 1828’ (opens in new window)

The second Bloomsbury Project conference was held at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL on 16 June 2009

Speakers and their subjects, 2009

Rosemary Ashton, ‘Germans in Bloomsbury’ (opens in new window)

Hugh Clout, ‘Alexander Maconochie: Britain’s First Professor of Geography’ (opens in new window)

Deborah Colville, ‘From Aerodiphros to Painless Dentistry: Bloomsbury’s Notable Inventors’ (opens in new window)

Caroline Dakers, ‘John Buonarrotti Papworth, Architect-Designer to the Merchants, Bankers and Tradesmen of Pre-Victorian London’

Richard Dennis, ‘Henry Ryecroft Meets Henry Maitland: George Gissing in and on Bloomsbury’ (opens in new window)

Anne Hardy, ‘Great Ormond Street Hospital and the Medical Community of London’

Matt Ingleby, ‘Encountering the Bloomsbury Barrister’s Wife: A Phenomenon of Local Literary History’ (opens in new window)

Richard Lines, ‘James John Garth Wilkinson 1812–1899: Author, Physician, Swedenborgian’ (opens in new window)

Tom Quick, ‘Robert Grant’s Lectures in Zoology: Teaching with Objects during the Early Years of UCL’

Barbara Waddington, ‘Edward Irving: A Shooting Star in a Presbyterian Pulpit’ (opens in new window)

The third and final Bloomsbury Project conference was held at UCL on 15 April 2011

Speakers and their subjects, 2011

Elizabeth Crawford, ‘Spirited Women of Gower Street: The Garretts and their Circle’ (opens in new window)

Neil Rennie, ‘Imaginary Bloomsbury: Dynamite and Peter Pan’ (opens in new window)

Monica Grose Hodge, ‘Arts and Crafts Protagonists Living in Bloomsbury’

Matt Ingleby, ‘Brewing Trouble: Bloomsbury and Booze’ (opens in new window)

Berry Chevasco, ‘The Sensational Spirit of Reform: Modern Babylon in Bloomsbury’ (opens in new window)

Natasha McEnroe, ‘Scientific Spirits: Galton and Grant in Bloomsbury’

Tom Quick, ‘Taming the Spirit: The University, Domesticity, and the Definition of Hypnosis in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Bloomsbury’

Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Story of the British Museum’s Unlucky Mummy’

Richard Lines, ‘Swedenborgianism and Pugilism: The William White Affair’ (opens in new window)

Tim Grass, ‘John Bate Cardale: Bloomsbury Apostle’ (opens in new window)