The Georgian period gave us many of Britain’s most beautiful buildings – in cities, towns and villages. Yet much of our Georgian inheritance remains in danger...

£40 – Members only 

Once described as ‘the Premier house of Essex’, Copped Hall was built in the 1750s by John Sanderson for John Conyers and remodelled internally by James Wyatt in the later eighteenth century. In 1917, the house was gutted by fire and thereafter followed a long period of neglect and decay until the Copped Hall Trust acquired the freehold of the property, ancillary buildings and gardens in 1995 and commenced a scheme of restoration. This tour will provide an opportunity to see how the restoration has progressed since the Group last visited and we are fortunate to have as our guide Alan Cox, Chairman and Architect of the Copped Hall Trust, who will discuss the ongoing restoration and the campaign to save the building. This afternoon tour will last for a few hours and refreshments (tea and cake) will be provided.

Members to make their own travel arrangements.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking.

This event is for members only.

If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.

£3 members/£5 non-members

The taste for Chinese luxury goods became firmly established in Britain in the late seventeenth century. Products like porcelain and silk were appreciated not just for their material glamour and visual sophistication, but also through their association with the longevity and stability of Chinese civilisation. By 1750 the British taste for Chinese pictures to use as wall decoration prompted Chinese artisans to begin to produce pictorial wallpaper for the western market.

This talk will chart the development of the different types of Chinese export wallpaper during the second half of the 18th century, using examples from the historic houses in the care of the National Trust and from elsewhere. Emile de Bruijn will show how the Chinese producers used traditional motifs, materials and techniques while at the same time responding to European tastes. He will place Chinese wallpapers in the wider context of what we might now call ‘orientalism’, the creation and perpetuation of a hybrid decorative style fusing Asian and European elements.

Emile de Bruijn works as an assistant curator for the National Trust, focusing on western decorative art and East Asian art. He published the monograph Chinese Wallpaper in Britain and Ireland in 2017 and he is currently working on a book about the impact of China and Japan on the houses and gardens of the National Trust.

The talks starts at 6.30pm. Joining details will be sent to attendees the day before.

Georgian Group members are eligible for a discount on their ticket by entering GGMEMBER at the checkout.

***This talk will be recorded. The recording will be available to all those who have purchased a ticket for a limited period of time after the event takes place***

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

(Photo © National Trust Images/Chris Lacey) 

£18

Wilton House in Salisbury, England, has been the ancestral home of the Earl of Pembroke for nearly 500 years and boasts one of the most fascinating and varied histories of all Britain’s historic houses. Shaped over centuries by the most significant names in architecture and interior design, Wilton is known as the finest example of Palladian architecture in England, with interiors by Inigo Jones, John Webb and Edward Pearce, furniture by William Kent and Thomas Chippendale, and unparalleled collections of both classical sculpture and Old Master paintings with masterpieces by Raphael, Titian, Rembrandt, and Tintoretto among its rooms. This talk will explore the development of the house and its collections.

John Martin Robinson an historian and acclaimed author of over thirty books, including studies of the Wyatts and the architecture of country houses. He worked for the Greater London Council Historic Buildings Division from 1974 to 1986 and is a former Vice-Chairman of the Georgian Group. He serves as Maltravers Herald Extraordinary, one of Her Majesty’s Officers of Arms, and is Librarian to the Duke of Norfolk. He has been an architectural writer for Country Life magazine for over forty years, contributing almost 400 articles and reviews. His most recent book, Wilton House: The Art, Architecture and Interiors of One of Britain’s Great Stately Homes, was published earlier this year.

Doors open 6pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome. Please note that this talk will be taking place at 12 Devonshire Street, London, W1G 7AB.

If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£40 – Members only 

This tour, kindly hosted by Lady Chichester, will provide members with an opportunity to visit a perfectly-formed, grade I-listed house that is rarely open to the public. Built c.1739 for German Pole, probably by William Smith the Younger, it underwent interior restoration by John Fowler in the 1950s and is a particularly good example of his work. In recent years Peregrine Bryant Architects have undertaken a scheme of restoration and repair of the house and we will be fortunate to be joined by Peregrine Bryant and the project architect Adesola Adeyemi on our visit. This afternoon tour will last for a couple of hours.

Members to make their own travel arrangements.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking.

This event is for Georgian Group members only.

If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.

(Photo: CJC Photography)

£3 members/£5 non-members

Largely rebuilt from its monastic origins in two phases, firstly in the 1740s by Henry Flitcroft and secondly in the 1790s by Henry Holland for the Dukes of Bedford, the Palladian Woburn Abbey houses one of the finest art collections in private hands along with a collection of exquisite furniture, porcelain and silverware. An extensive restoration project, due for completion next year, was begun in 2020 and will include works to conserve many of the treasures within the collection. We will be joined by Matthew Hirst, Curator at Woburn, who will discuss some of the highlights of Woburn Abbey’s interiors and collections along with the joys and challenges of helping to care for one of England’s finest country houses.

Matthew Hirst has been the Curator of Woburn Abbey and its collections since October 2015. He is a specialist in historic interiors and decorative arts and has worked in country house collections for his whole career. He began his curatorial life with the Rothschild Collection at Waddesdon Manor, followed by 8 years managing the Devonshire collection as Head of Arts & Historic Collections at Chatsworth.

The talks starts at 6.30pm. Joining details will be sent to attendees the day before.

Georgian Group members are eligible for a discount on their ticket by entering GGMEMBER at the checkout.

***This talk will be recorded. The recording will be available to all those who have purchased a ticket for a limited period of time after the event takes place***

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£3 members/£5 non-members

The fashion for print rooms spread rapidly in Britain and Ireland from the 1750s onwards. Anything from modest numbers to more than 300 prints could be trimmed and pasted onto the walls of one of these rooms, embellished with printed borders. They were trompe l’oeil paper galleries, the prints ‘hung’ from bows and rings, interspersed with floral swags and festoons, sculptural prints of busts and urns ‘placed’ on dado rails. Fragile spaces, only a dozen survive today.

This lecture will explore this fascinating trend in interior decoration, considering its emergence, its key characteristics, the men and women involved in creating these spaces, and the decline of the fashion in the early nineteenth century.

Kate Retford is Professor of Art History at Birkbeck, University of London. She has published widely on eighteenth-century British art, particularly on portraiture and the country house art collection. Her work includes The Art of Domestic Life: Family Portraiture in Eighteenth-Century England (2006); Placing Faces: The Portrait and the English Country House in the Long Eighteenth Century, co-edited with Gill Perry et al. (2013); and The Georgian London Town House: Building, Collecting and Display, co-edited with Susanna Avery-Quash (2019). Her recent monograph on the eighteenth-century British conversation piece, The Conversation Piece: Making Modern Art in Eighteenth-Century Britain, was published by Yale for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in 2017. She is currently working on a book about print rooms in eighteenth-century country houses, and developing a project looking at the presentation of the country house as family home.

The talks starts at 6.30pm. Joining details will be sent to attendees the day before.

Georgian Group members are eligible for a discount on their ticket by entering GGMEMBER at the checkout.

***This talk will be recorded. The recording will be available to all those who have purchased a ticket for a limited period of time after the event takes place***

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£3 members/£5 non-members

This talk, ‘Collecting and Displaying Fakes and Copies in the Eighteenth-Century Home’, examines the role that forgery, reproduction, falsified ‘improvements’, and restorations had to the grand tourist’s experience in eighteenth-century Italy, and the materials collected and brought back to Britain. It looks in particular at how these forgeries and copies were displayed in the Georgian home, and how such works can be situated within the long tradition of all’antica reproduction. Figurative sculpture as well as more ornamental domestic works, such as Piranesi’s now famous ‘Newdigate torchères’ at the Ashmolean in Oxford, are considered in this talk.

Dr Peter Lindfield, a Visiting Research Fellow and former Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at Manchester Metropolitan University, has been exploring the manifestation of forgery and debates over authenticity in antiquarian material culture in Georgian and early Victorian Britain since 2016. He is currently preparing a monograph on this subject, and he has recently been working upon an early Victorian forger, George Shaw from Uppermill on the outskirts of Manchester, and the relationship his forgeries have to the recently re-discovered Henry VII bed.

The talks starts at 6.30pm. Joining details will be sent to attendees the day before.

Georgian Group members are eligible for a discount on their ticket by entering GGMEMBER at the checkout.

***This talk will be recorded. The recording will be available to all those who have purchased a ticket for a limited period of time after the event takes place***

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£18

Conventional greetings between the Georgians required that gentlemen raised their hats and bowed, while ladies curtseyed. Yet, quietly, a new salutation was also emerging, in the form of the egalitarian handshake. In this lecture, Penelope Corfield analyses the origins, extent, and meanings of this significant cultural shift. It will be shown that, just as today when meeting someone entails a quick mental audit of suitable greetings, somewhat similar calculations applied in the social flux of eighteenth-century Britain. The study of inter-personal salutations in the past has the added challenge that people rarely recorded this sort of intimate detail of daily life. Etiquette books, letters, diaries, travelogues, novels and plays are all sources for potential analysis, however all have their limitations in accurately recording how people greeted each other in Georgian Britain.

Professor Penelope J. Corfield is an expert on Georgian urban, social and cultural history; and is currently researching the dynamics of inter-personal greetings in the long eighteenth century. She is Professor Emeritus at Royal Holloway, London University; Research Fellow at Newcastle University; and President of the International Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.

Doors open 6pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome. Please note that this talk will be taking place at 12 Devonshire Street, London, W1G 7AB.

If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£15 (£10 for Young Georgian members)

The Georgian re-invention of the Wardour landscape was the magnum opus of Henry Arundell, 8th Baron Arundell of Wardour. As well as examining these works as exemplars of the Picturesque Movement, Frederick Hervey-Bathurst will contextualise Lord Arundell’s position as a prominent Roman Catholic peer in an era of Anti-Catholic sentiment, arguing that his redevelopment of the family seat was, in addition, an expression of his faith and a proclamation of patriotism.

Frederick Hervey-Bathurst studied Architectural History at the Universities of Edinburgh and Virginia, graduating in 2020. The interplay of Lord Arundell’s identity and the rebuilding of Wardour was the subject of his dissertation and he has been continuing this line of research since then.

Doors open 6pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome

Young Georgian members are eligible for a discounted ticket by entering the code YGdiscount at checkout.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£18

As the sun set slowly on the British Empire in the years after the Second World War, the nation’s stately homes were in crisis. Tottering under the weight of rising taxes and a growing sense that they had no place in twentieth-century Britain, hundreds of ancestral piles were dismantled and demolished. But, surprisingly, many more survived, as duke and duchesses desperately clung to their ancestral seats and a new class of homeowners bought their way into country life. Adrian Tinniswood recreates a forgotten moment in the history of the English country house, a curiously intimate collaboration between members of the crumbling old order and of the rising new, bringing to life the way in which a rakish, raffish yet aristocratic Swinging London interacted with traditional rural values in elegant drawing rooms, on windswept grouse moors and in the bedrooms of the stately homes of England.

Adrian Tinniswood is a writer and historian, who has also worked with a number of organisations such as the National Trust and has lectured at universities in the UK and the US. He has published extensively, having authored some sixteen books on social and architectural history, including Behind the Throne: A Domestic History of the Royal Household. His latest book, Noble Ambitions: The Fall and Rise of the Postwar Country House, is released in October.

Doors open 6pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome. Please note that this talk will be taking place at 12 Devonshire Street, London, W1G 7AB.

If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£3 members/£5 non-members

The élite eighteenth-century designed landscape was a place of novelty, artfully planned not only to offer spaces of delight and repose but also to induce in the visitor frissons of astonishment and awe. Garden structures, or ‘Fabricks’, played their part as theatrical set-pieces. Using architect William Wrighte’s Grotesque Architecture, or Rural Amusement, first published in 1767, in this lecture Rosemary Yallop will explore the diverse concepts which underlay garden fabrick designs of the period, which incorporated materials such as tree roots, shells and animal bones. In conflating theories of primitive architecture, allusions to exotic lands, geological forms and romantic bucolicism, Wrighte’s compositions – huts, hermitages, grottoes and mosques – reveal contemporary appetites for both erudition and whimsy, and play with representations of the ‘Natural’.

Dr Rosemary Yallop is an architectural historian and independent lecturer and writer, who has published in the Georgian Group Journal among others. She completed her doctorate in Architectural History at the University of Oxford and is a course tutor for the Oxford University Continuing Education Department and the V&A Museum. She is a Vice-Chairman of the Georgian Group.

The talks starts at 6.30pm. Joining details will be sent to attendees the day before.

Georgian Group members are eligible for a discount on their ticket by entering GGMEMBER at the checkout.

***This talk will be recorded. The recording will be available to all those who have purchased a ticket for a limited period of time after the event takes place***

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£18

Like many well-to-do Georgian families, the Atkinson family’s wealth was acquired at a terrible cost, through the labour and lives of enslaved Africans. Drawing on his ancestors’ extensive private correspondence, as well as public archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Richard Atkinson has spent ten years piecing together their unsettling story, from the weather-beaten house in Cumbria where they once lived to the ruins of their sugar estates in Jamaica – exposing many dark secrets along the way.

Richard Atkinson is a book publisher who is responsible, among other things, for some of the most successful cookbooks of recent years. Coincidentally, it was his discovery of a cookery manuscript written by a Georgian ancestor that set him on the decade-long genealogical odyssey which eventually led to Mr Atkinson’s Rum Contract. He lives in London, but holds a deep-rooted affection for the north of England, the land of his ancestors.

Doors open 6pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine). All welcome. Please note that this talk will be taking place at 12 Devonshire Street, London, W1G 7AB.

If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking