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

Peter Mark Roget (1779–1869)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

He was a Lecturer at the Russell Institution, and Secretary of the Royal Society from 1827 to 1849

He was involved with the general running and the library of the Royal Society of Medicine

was a founder member of the SDUK, and contributor to its pamphlets

His famous Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases was written only after his retirement aged 70; J. M. Barrie said it was his constant companion when he first came to London and lodged near Great Ormond Street in the 1880s (J. M. Barrie, preface to Peter Pan, 1904)

At the time of the 1851 census he was living at 18 Upper Bedford Place, a widower, living with his son John and unmarried sister Ann and their household

For more general biographical information about Peter Mark Roget, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography