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>> Professor Rosemary Ashton:
The UCL Bloomsbury Project is funded for three years
by the Leverhulme Trust, and we're interested in showing
that during the 19th Century Bloomsbury was the cradle
and became very fast the centre of educational enterprises
of all kinds which were in some way forward looking,
many of which have rich archives which we're exploring
and which we wish to pass on to other researchers as well
as to the ordinary interested person.
This is the house on the south side of Bedford Square
in the heart of Bloomsbury
where the lady's college was first started up.
It later became Bedford College and a part of the University
of London, but it was the first college
for higher education for women.
Set up in 1849 by a woman called Elizabeth Reid
who had been widowed earlier in life and was wealthy.
So she set up the college here in this house,
and she got a number of the professors
from University College London down the road to come
and teach the women here.
In 1878, it was University College London
which first allowed women to take degrees.
But in 1849, you've got this very first attempt
to allow women to think that they're actually capable
of studying hard subjects at a high level.
Having lived and worked here for many years and having written
about a number of these people, I find that it wasn't difficult
to come to the idea of actually doing a huge study with help
and with a team of 19th Century Bloomsbury
with UCL at the heart of it.
But also looking at a number of other institutions
which are much less well known.
>> Dr. Deborah Colville: When I arrived at UCL,
I was always fascinated by walking around Bloomsbury
and discovering this strange mixture
of very grand residential houses and so many institutions.
And like Rosemary, I'd always wondered why
that happened, how that happened.
So I'm very glad to be able to have the opportunity
to trace the development.
There are two things that I'm in charge of really.
One is the website.
I'm responsible for making sure
that everything we discover gets edited in some form
and put on to our website.
And the other thing I do is I'm the main person who goes
around archives, looking
at archival material relating to our institutions.
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I've got medical records here which are very interesting
and these are from the early years
of University College Hospital.
These are from the 1840s.
And these are the medical records relating to the patient
for whom those are the Carswell drawings.
These are the diseased hands of the patient, Catherine Holmes,
who came and was treated but sadly died.
>> Professor Rosemary Ashton: The first kindergarten
in Britain was set up in Tavistock Place place in 1854
by a couple of German political exiles, Yohannes Honger
and his wife Berta, who had came over with other exiles
from the European revolutions in 1848 to escape censorship
and illiberality at home.
We need to remember that now what we consider as mainstream,
that is teaching young children through play and leisure
and games was in the mid
and early Victorian period completely revolutionary.
Bloomsbury, itself, grew during the 19th Century
from a very small place in 1800 to the place
that we know it now, and Bloomsbury is really now
as it was by the middle of the 19th Century.
Here behind me is Mary Ward House, which was first known
as the Passmore Edwards Settlement named
after two people, Mary Ward better known then
as the novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward and John Passmore Edwards
who had been a penniless young man in Cornwall
who had made his fortune coming to London
in the newspaper business.
And both of them were very keen to extend education to the poor,
and in particular to offer play and learning facilities
for the children of the poor
in the days before universal education.
And this was an innovative thing in the 1890s to attempt
to extend education and leisure activities also
for the poor of the area.
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Bloomsbury is still a very cultural and intellectual place
with lots of institutions and organisations and archives.
>> Dr. Deborah Colville: When people talk about Bloomsbury,
they think of it as this kind of centre of progressive education
and medical research, which is really interesting
because that's just a continuous history right from the 1820s.
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