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

Thomas Wilson (1764–1843)

a summary of his Bloomsbury connections

A wealthy benefactor and occasional lay preacher in Congregationalist churches, he was one of the dissenting group led by Francis Augustus Cox who were planning to found a dissenting university when they joined with Thomas Campbell and Henry Brougham in 1825 to found the secular University of London (later University College London)

Wilson was elected to the first Council of the University in December 1825, going out of office in February 1837 (Annual Report 1837, UCL Records Office)

It was Wilson who gave notice at a Council meeting of 12 March 1831 that he would move for the Professor of Anatomy, Granville Sharp Pattison, to be removed from his chair after complaints from students and colleagues (Council Minutes, vol. II, UCL Records Office)

He had financed the building of several new chapels on the outskirts of London as it grew in the early years of the century; among these was one built in Tonbridge Place in 1810 (Oxford Dictionary of Biography)

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