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

John Whishaw (1764–1840)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was a Fellow of the Royal Society and an intimate member of the influential ‘Holland House set’ of Whig politicians and men of letters

In 1815 he wrote an account of Mungo Park’s life as a preface to Park’s Journal of a Mission to the Interior of Africa in the year 1805

He was a member of the first Council of the University of London (later University College London) from December 1825 and of its first Education Committee in 1827

He was one of the less active supporters of the University, and left the Council in February 1831 without being proposed for re-election (Annual Report 1831, UCL Records Office)