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

Theophilus Ahijah Smith (1809–1879)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

The son of a Baptist missionary to seafarers, he was born in Penzance in 1809, but baptised at Dr Williams’s Library in London

He followed in his father’s charitable and missionary footsteps, co-founding the Midnight Meeting Movement in 1860 and becoming its Secretary from 1861 to 1864

He had also been Secretary of the Female Aid Society from 1847 to 1861, based at 27 Red Lion Square

For more general biographical information about Theophilus Smith, see his entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (included in the entry for his father, George Charles Smith)