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

Benjamin Shaw (c. 1770–1843)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was MP for Westbury 1812–1818 and Treasurer of the Baptist Missionary Society 1821–1826

A well-known man in the City, he was Chairman of Lloyd’s Coffee-House (Lloyd’s of London) in 1824

He was one of the three wealthy men sympathetic to the proposal for a new university open to all faiths who bought in 1825 the land on which the University of London (later University College London) was to be built; the others were Isaac Lyon Goldsmid and John Smith