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

Alexander John Scott (1805–1866)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

Having studied at Glasgow University, he was ordained a Church of Scotland minister in 1827

He became a follower of Edward Irving, acting as his assistant from autumn 1828 in the new National Scotch Church built for Irving in Regent Square

Though he distanced himself from the ‘speaking in tongues’ at the Regent Square church, he was dismissed by his presbytery for heresy in 1831; subsequently an independent congregation formed round him in Woolwich

In November 1848 he was appointed Professor of English Language and Literature at University College London, a position he held with some success until he was appointed the first Principal of the new Owens College (later Manchester University), founded in Manchester in 1850 on non-sectarian principles similar to those of University College London

He had also been one of the first professors at the Ladies’ College (later Bedford College), opened by Elisabeth Jesser Reid in Bedford Square in 1849

His wife Ann was one of Mrs Reid’s close circle of friends and supporters in the founding of the Ladies’ College

A charismatic lecturer and preacher, he was a keen reformer in education, helping to found the Manchester Working Men’s College in 1858 on the model of the Working Men’s College founded by Frederick Denison Maurice in Red Lion Square in 1854

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