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

Sheldon Amos (1835–1886)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was the son of Andrew Amos, first Professor of Law at UCL, and himself became Professor of Jurisprudence at UCL in 1869

He taught at the Working Women’s College in Queen Square, and became a member of its council in 1869

In 1870 he married the lady superintendent of the Working Women’s College, Sarah Maclardie Bunting

They both supported Josephine Butler 1870 in the agitation against Contagious Diseases Act, and continued to support campaigns against the regulation of prostitution and in support of women’s suffrage

From their marriage in 1870 until the birth of their first child, Maurice, in 1872, they chose to live in a poor area near Red Lion Square, so as to live among the poor, although once they had children they moved to New Barnet

In 1880 the family settled first in Australia and then, finding this unsatisfactory, in Egypt in an attempt to ease Amos’s chronic asthma; in 1878 he had approached John Chapman, formerly of 142 Strand, about his patented ice bags (Sheldon Amos to John Chapman, 1 and 18 October 1878, MS MISC 3A–3B, UCL Special Collections)

After Amos’s death in Egypt in 1886, Sarah and the two children toured Europe and then in late 1887 returned to England and took a house in Upper Woburn Place

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