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

Winthrop Mackworth Praed (1802–1839)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

Born in John Street, educated at Eton and subsequently a brilliant classics student at Cambridge, he was a Tory who published anti-Reform verses in the late 1820s

He also published a satirical poem about the University of London (later University College London), entitled ‘The London University: A Discourse delivered by a College Tutor at a Supper-Party’, which included the lines:

’Tis a terrible crisis for Cam and for Isis!
Fat butchers are learning dissection;
And looking-glass-makers become sabbath-breakers
To study the rules of reflection.
(Morning Chronicle, 19 July 1825)

For more general biographical information about Winthrop Mackworth Praed, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography