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

Julian Goldsmid (1838–1896)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was the grandson of Isaac Lyon Goldsmid and nephew of Francis Henry Goldsmid, whom he succeeded as third baronet in 1878

He continued the family tradition of involvement with University College London and University College Hospital

He was Treasurer of University College London in the 1880s (H. Hale Bellot, University College London 1826–1926, 1929), Liberal MP for South St Pancras (The Times, 4 June 1886), and, from October 1877, also a governor of the Foundling Hospital (R. H. Nichols and F. A. Wray, The History of the Foundling Hospital, 1935)

On his death in January 1896 John Simon wrote to The Times to praise him as the last of the three generations of Goldsmids who had struggled for Jewish emancipation, supported infant education for Jewish children, and helped found and serve the University of London (later University College London) and the North London Hospital (later University College Hospital) (The Times, 13 January 1896)

The latter, in particular, wrote Simon, “owes its existence to the Goldsmids, and they have been from first to last its main props” (The Times, 13 January 1896)

His younger sister Isabel was President of the Jewish High School for Girls in Chenies Street