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

George Birkbeck (1776–1841)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He took his medical degree at Edinburgh, and then taught natural philosophy at the recently-founded Anderson’s Institution, in Glasgow, which offered free extra-curricular classes on popular science to working men

Along with his friend Henry Brougham, he then opened a similar establishment, the London Mechanics’ Institution, in December 1823 at 29, Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane

He was also an associate of Brougham’s in the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, founded in 1826

He was also one of the founders in the same year of the University of London (later University College London), and an active member of its first Council (H. Hale Bellot, University College London 1826–1926, 1929)

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