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

Henry Sass (1787–1844)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

(John) Henry Sass was a Bloomsbury-born painter whose father (Henry Sass senior) was also an artist, working from studios in Upper King Street and High Holborn in the early nineteenth century

Henry junior established Bloomsbury’s most successful nineteenth-century art school, Sass’s Drawing Academy, at 50 Great Russell Street, opposite the British Museum, in 1818

It moved to 6 Charlotte Street in 1820 and was still flourishing in 1840

Sass died aged 56 in 1844, aged 56; according to his obituary in the Gentlemen’s Magazine, he left a wife and seven children (Gentlemen’s Magazine, vol. 177, February 1845)

For more general biographical information about Henry Sass, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography