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 Bate Cardale (1802–1877)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was the first ‘Apostle’ of the Catholic Apostolic Church, so named by its founder and benefactor Henry Drummond (see David Tierney, ed. Negley Harte, ‘The Catholic Apostolic Church: A Study in Tory Millenarianism’, Historical Research, 63, 1990)

He was born at no. 28 Lamb’s Conduit Street in 1802

He was a solicitor at 2 Bedford Row until he retired in 1833; he was solicitor to Rugby School and Gray’s Inn, both of which were important landowners in Bloomsbury

With his wife Emma and sister Emily he attended the Anglican church of St John’s, Bedford Row, a proprietary chapel of St Andrew’s, Holborn, until Cardale became interested in the charismatic utterances of Edward Irving at the National Scotch Church in Regent Square

Cardale knew Irving through Henry Drummond and the conferences held at Drummond’s large estate in Albury, Surrey, to discuss prophecy

The Cardales left St John’s to attend Irving’s services, accompanying Irving to Newman Street on his expulsion from Regent Square (Columba Graham Flegg, ‘Gathered Under Apostles’: A Study of the Catholic Apostolic Church, 1992); it was Cardale who took the lease on the hall in Newman Street

In November 1832, after Cardale, his wife, and his sister had all spoken in ‘tongues’, Drummond appointed him the first Apostle of the Catholic Apostolic Church

Cardale took charge, ordaining Drummond the second Apostle in September 1833

Irving was ordained ‘Angel’, below the rank of Apostle

After Irving’s death in December 1834, Cardale and Drummond continued to appoint Apostles until there were twelve

While Drummond undertook to proselytise in Scotland, and other Apostles visited foreign countries to establish the millenarian faith abroad, Cardale took charge of the English branch

He devised and wrote most of the rules of service, publishing several works on the new faith, and he oversaw the building of the grand central church in London, the Catholic Apostolic Church in Gordon Square, which was opened for worship on Christmas Eve 1853

After living with his family on Drummond’s Albury estate during the late 1830s and early 1840s, Cardale moved to Bedford House in Bloomsbury in 1847

Bedford House was the middle one of three large attached houses on Tavistock Place North, to the north-east of Tavistock Square; the other two were Russell House and Tavistock House, in which Charles Dickens and his family lived from 1851 to 1860

Cardale and Dickens shared a driveway on the property, which had been built originally as one house, Tavistock House, by James Burton in the 1790s, then enlarged and turned into three houses in the 1820s

The Cardales moved out in October 1854, returning to Albury, but Cardale continued as the chief Apostle of the Catholic Apostolic Church in England until his death in 1877

For more information about Cardale and the Catholic Apostolic Church, see John Lancaster, ‘John Bate Cardale, Pillar of Apostles: A Quest for Catholicity’ (unpub. dissertation, St Andrews University, 1978)

For more general biographical information about John Bate Cardale, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography