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 William Ward, 4th Viscount Dudley and Ward, and 1st Earl of Dudley (1781–1833)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

A supporter of Canning in the House of Lords, he was, like Canning, in favour of the removal of Catholic disabilities but not of parliamentary reform in general

He was appointed to the Council of the University of London (later University College London) at its first meeting on 22 December 1825

Like many of his fellow members, he had studied in Edinburgh

He was not one of the most active members of the university, being preoccupied with his political career—he was sworn in as Foreign Secretary on the day of the foundation stone ceremony for the new University, 30 April 1827—and enduring a troubled private life

Ward was mentally unstable, a condition he attributed to the “brutal neglect and unkindness” of his father when he was a boy (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography), and in 1832 he was confined in an asylum, where he died the following year

His early association with the University of London gave the hostile Tory newspaper John Bull an excuse to allude to his well-known liaison with Lady Lyndhurst, the wife of the Lord Chancellor, in an article on the ‘Cockney University’, published on 18 December 1825

The writer pretended to think that each member of Council would teach a subject in the projected institution, and suggested that “Viscount Dudley and Ward will lecture on Platonic Philosophy” (H. Hale Bellot, University College London 1826–1926, 1929)

For more general biographical information about John William Ward, 4th Viscount Dudley and Ward, and 1st Earl of Dudley, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography