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
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Bloomsbury and the Bloomsbury Project
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George Birkbeck (1776–1841)
a summary of his Bloomsbury connections
He took his medical degree at Edinburgh, and then taught natural philosophy at the recently-founded Anderson’s Institution, in Glasgow, which offered free extra-curricular classes on popular science to working men
Along with his friend Henry Brougham, he then opened a similar establishment, the London Mechanics’ Institution, in December 1823 at 29, Southampton Buildings, Chancery Lane
For more general biographical information about George Birkbeck, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
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