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

 

James Mill (1773–1836)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was a Scottish political philosopher, disciple and friend of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, spiritual father of University College London

The father of the famous writer on liberty John Stuart Mill, he was at the heart of a group of radical political thinkers in London in the 1820s

He and his friends participated in the movement for political reform, some of them as reforming MPs, and others, like Mill, through books, pamphlets, and influential articles in journals such as the Whig Edinburgh Review and, from its founding in 1824, the radical Westminster Review

Mill was sceptical in religion, in favour of representative democracy (though not votes for women), legal reform, and the extension of education

With his best friend from their school days together at Montrose Academy, Joseph Hume, he was an original member of the Council of the University of London (later University College London), one of many Scots and Scottish-educated men involved with its foundation and operation

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