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

Bernard Edward Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk (1765–1842)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was the first Catholic to succeed to the dukedom

He was permitted to act as Earl Marshal by a special Act of Parliament in 1824, and after the passing of the Roman Catholic Relief Bill in 1829, took his seat in the House of Lords

He was an early supporter and member of the first Council of the University of London (later University College London), founded in 1825 to offer higher education to dissenters, Catholics, Jews, and others who were precluded from graduating at Oxford or Cambridge because they were not confessing Anglicans

Norfolk remained on the University’s Council until February 1830, when his turn came to leave and he was not re-elected (Annual Report 1830, UCL Records Office)

For more general biographical information about Bernard Edward Howard, 12th Duke of Norfolk, see his (brief) entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography