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 Warburton (1784–1858)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

A reforming MP with an interest in scientific and medical education and a Fellow of the Royal Society, he was on the first Council of the University of London (later University College London)

As a member of the Education Committee he supported the appointment in February 1828 to the Chair of Mathematics of the brilliant 21-year-old Augustus De Morgan (Education Committee 19 February 1828, Committee Minutes 1828–1829, and Council Minutes, vol. I, 23 February 1828, UCL Records Office; Sophia De Morgan, Memoir of Augustus De Morgan, 1882)

Warburton also sat on the University’s Hospital Committee from its founding in March 1828, seeing the plans through to the opening of the North London Hospital (later University College Hospital) in 1834, the same year in which he chaired a House of Commons Select Committee on medical education (H. Hale Bellot, University College London 1826–1926, 1929)

He was an active member of the University’s Council until at least 1847, being regularly re-elected by ballot whenever his turn came to be one of the six members automatically going off Council unless re-elected (Annual Reports, UCL Records Office; the reports from 1847–1856 are missing)

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