Sometimes, the old-fashioned ways of writing about cities or parts of cities are the best. This excellent book, beautifully written by one of the doyennes of English studies, looks at nineteenth-century Bloomsbury largely through the experiences, efforts and aspirations of its eminent persons and institutions. It sits comfortably in the hand, is designed with modest grace and includes just two economical gatherings of black and white pictures. Its dust jacket carries a charming sepia print of University College London with schoolboys playing in the foreground. All this takes one back to the best traditions of English writing and publishing 40 or 50 years ago, when history books of such a kind were confidently addressed to a ‘general public’.

Rosemary Ashton might be horrified to hear her book called old-fashioned. Her aims, she makes clear, are revisionist. Tired of hearing Bloomsbury endlessly linked with the Woolfs, the Bells, et hoc genus omne of supercilious early modern Bohemians, she wishes to reclaim the district for the Victorian pioneers who made it, in her view, the intellectual heart of London. Men and women of serious and reforming purpose, they worked through social institutions of all kinds and not only wrote and thought but taught and fought. So Professor Ashton's book is a skilful weaving together of the personal, the pedagogical and the institutional. It is also backed up by that up-to-date mechanism, the evolving website, to be found at www.ucl.ac.uk/bloomsbury-project. Perhaps – here is a thought – websites of this nature can make room for nicer, simpler books once again.

The basis of Ashton's story is the founding of University College London in the 1820s and its early struggles for recognition, sometimes comic, often frustrating and always precarious, against bigotry and vested interest. This tale, never so engagingly told before, sets the progressivist tone for the book as a whole and, the author would argue, for Bloomsbury as a whole. From the efforts of a hotchpotch of radical politicians, professors and doctors, ranging from the pompous Brougham through sundry Unitarians and agnostics to half-humbugs like the Rev. Dionysius Lardner, a current of reform seeped first through and then out of UCL, suffusing the area and spawning hospitals, halls of residence, schools and smaller colleges, clubs and so forth, some permanent, more fugitive, down to the creation in the 1890s of the handsome Passmore Edwards Settlement, later renamed after its founder, the novelist Mrs Humphry Ward (Mary Ward). All this is chronicled with sprightliness, meticulous scholarship and a balance of detachment and admiration.

Not that the current was uniform or smooth; often it was confused and chaotic. Ashton is interested in religious radicals, so she has, for instance, an absorbing ‘millennial’ chapter on Edward Irving, so charismatic a preacher that his wealthy posthumous followers created their own odd sect and built a grand stone ‘Catholic Apostolic’ church slap in the centre of Bloomsbury. Next door in Gordon Square lay University Hall, now Doctor Williams’ Library. Ashton offers a sympathetic yet wry account of this hall of residence's short-lived, changeable existence, notably its bumbling management under the poet Clough, who combined high ideals and diffidence with a certain self-absorption.

So much for men. Women dominate the latter half of the book, for it was in Bloomsbury that women's higher education enjoyed its first sustained outing, well before better-known ventures in Oxford and Cambridge. Elisabeth Reid, founder in 1849 of the Ladies’ College in Bedford Square (hence the name of Bedford College), was too cautious and too beholden to male preceptors to conform to the modern idea of a feminist heroine, but she persisted. It was in Bloomsbury too, or at least its eastern edge, that the celebrated London School of Medicine for Women was founded, involving wary co-operation between the two celebrated pioneers of medical training for women, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake.

These and the many other initiatives set out in the book give ample support to Rosemary Ashton's vision of Bloomsbury as Victorian London's most go-ahead district. It has to be added that hers is a book about the life not of the street but of the mind, and the outgoing mind at that. Christina Rossetti, for instance, eking out her dark, silent, pious spinsterhood in Torrington Square and caring for old aunts in bedjackets does not get a real look-in, though on literary grounds she might surely have qualified.

As to Bloomsbury's wider geography, governance and commerce, hints slip in here and there but they are never developed, apart from some striking thoughts about the connection between the arrival of the main-line railway termini on Euston Road and the eventual success of UCL. At Bloomsbury's core lay the squares and streets of the Bedford Estate, about which Ashton has a little to say – gated, pub-free and, as a result, crushingly dull. The twentieth century has taken away the gates and destroyed some of the squares in the name of university expansion, but somehow the flatness remains; central Bloomsbury has never been fun. Its fringes were always livelier: Bedford Square and the streets below the British Museum southwards; Queen Square, Red Lion Square and Lamb's Conduit Street and the Foundling Hospital to the east; bustling Tottenham Court Road with its great furniture shops like Heal's and Maple's to the west. Why that should have been is a question that goes unaddressed. A discriminating feeling for place is the one deficiency of this remarkable book.