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...

£3 members, £5 non-members

Although somewhat overshadowed by contemporaries such as Vanbrugh and Hawksmoor, Thomas Archer is now recognised as one of the most significant English Baroque architects. The practitioner of an extraordinarily extravagant Baroque style, marked by lavish curves, large scale and bold detail, his works include St John’s Smith Square, Roehampton House and Heythrop Hall. This lecture will serve as a general introduction to Archer’s work, background and role at court, and will include insights from Dr Lawrence-Beaton’s own personal involvement in the recent restoration of one of Archer’s key country houses.

Dr. Helen Lawrence-Beaton is a Senior Architectural Historian at ADAM Architecture in Winchester. Her PhD thesis (University of Bristol) was on Thomas Archer (1668-1743) and she is now accepted as the key authority on this remarkable architect. She is currently preparing a new monograph on his life and works.

The talk starts at 6.30pm. Joining details for the talk will be sent the morning of the 21 September.

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

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£3 members, £5 non-members

In October 1712 Samuel Molyneux travelled from his native Dublin to be elected Fellow of the Royal Society in London.  During his stay in England he corresponded with his learned uncle Thomas Molyneux, bestowing intellectual and well-measured accounts of some of the most noteworthy bibliophiles, collectors and connoisseurs of the day as well as first-hand descriptions of ecclesiastical and secular buildings, historic royal palaces, parks and gardens and notable public and private libraries and art collections, many of which become the nuclei of the British Museum and British Library. For the modern reader these seven meticulously written letters offer an erudite and discursive analysis of early-Enlightenment London providing a fascinating insight into the author’s intimate and voluminous knowledge of the cultural and scientific world. Molyneux also visited Oxford and Cambridge where he made detailed first-hand descriptions of the Ashmolean Museum and several colleges.

Over a century after Molyneux’s death copies of these letters found their way into the archives of the Corporation of Southampton, now Southampton City Archives. In 2011 they were published for the first time in their entirety by the London Topographical Society

Paul Holden FSA is a Project Curator for the National Trust House and freelance architectural historian. He has published widely on architectural history and curatorial issues in, amongst others, Apollo, British Library Electronic Journal, Country Life, Furniture History, Georgian Group Journal, Hampshire Studies, Journal of Liberal History, Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, Parliamentary History and Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society.  His publications include Lanhydrock (History Press, 2006), The Lanhydrock Atlas (Cornwall Editions, 2010), The London Letters of Samuel Molyneux 1712-13 (London Topographical Society) and Celebrating Pevsner (Francis Boutle, 2017). A book on ’50 years of the Cornish Buildings Group’ will come out in December 2019 and he is currently pulling together a set of proceedings from the 2019 Cornish Buildings Group/ Historic England conference on Cornish distinctiveness.

The talk will start 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.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£3 members, £5 non-members

Richard Mead (1673-1754) was one of the foremost physicians of his age, whose eminent patients included Robert Walpole, Alexander Pope and Queen Anne on her deathbed. Known for his work on poisons and public health, he advised the government on preventative measures to stop the spread of plague from France. Mead was involved in early smallpox inoculations and even allegedly fought a duel to defend his views on the disease. In his day, however, he was as much known for his sumptuous collection – which rivalled that of Sir Hans Sloane – and for his philanthropy and support of the arts. 

Stephanie Chapman was formerly Curator of the Foundling Museum, where she oversaw an exhibition on Richard Mead in 2014-15, and is now Collections Manager at the Mercers’ Company.  

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.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

This lecture is part of a four-part series on Georgian Medicine and Science:

27 October: A Georgian Chemist: Humphry Davy 

4 November: The brothers Bell: emotion, war and surgical identity in late Georgian Britain

10 November: ‘How gracefully the dead dogs float’: Building and Public Health in Early Modern England

£3 members, £5 non-members

This illustrated talk will discuss the life and work of the Penzance-born Humphry Davy (1778-1829) and his rise from provincial obscurity to metropolitan fame, first as Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Institution and later as President of the Royal Society of London. Davy’s work ranged across diverse areas such as nitrous oxide (laughing gas), agricultural chemistry, mineralogy, the miners’ safety lamp, analysis of ancient Roman pigments, his attempts to unroll chemically the papyri excavated from Herculaneum as well as the advice he provided on ventilating buildings such as the House of Lords and Newgate Prison. 

Prof Frank James is a Professor of History of Science at UCL. He was formerly Head of Collections and Heritage at the Royal Institution. 

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.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

This lecture is part of a four-part series on Georgian Medicine and Science:

13 October: Dr Richard Mead: living in the broad sunshine of life

4 November: The brothers Bell: emotion, war and surgical identity in late Georgian Britain

10 November: ‘How gracefully the dead dogs float’: Building and Public Health in Early Modern England

£3 members, £5 non-members

This talk will explore the life and work of two of the most influential surgeons of early nineteenth-century Britain, the brothers John Bell (1763-1820) and Charles Bell (1774-1842) It will focus less upon their vitally important contributions to anatomy and physiology than upon the ways in which they defined what it meant to be a surgeon. In particular, the lecture will explore how they shaped personal and professional identities that emphasised emotional self-reflection and championed the values of compassion and sympathy for the patient. We shall also see how this emotional disposition was shaped by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, events in which both played a role and which exercised a profound influence over their sense of self. 

Mike Brown is a cultural historian of medicine, surgery, gender and war, with a special interest in emotions and identities. He is a Reader at the University of Roehampton and has recently overseen a four-year research project, funded by the Wellcome Trust, investigating the relationship between surgery and emotion from 1800 to the present.  

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.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

This lecture is part of a four-part series on Georgian Medicine and Science:

13 October: Dr Richard Mead: living in the broad sunshine of life

27 October: A Georgian Chemist: Humphry Davy 

10 November: ‘How gracefully the dead dogs float’: Building and Public Health in Early Modern England

£3 members, £5 non-members

The recent pandemic has prompted a flowering of ingenuity: clothes manufacturers have turned to making PPE, and gin distillers to making hand sanitiser, while exhibition centres and disused military facilities have been transformed into Nightingale and Seacole field hospitals. Specialists of every stripe have invested their energies in devising work-arounds for the present, and planning the best ways forward. Alongside the projections of epidemiologists and forecasts of economists, historians too have been taking a long view of the history of cities and epidemic disease in order to discern what – if anything – past crises can teach us.  

The literature of epidemic disease reveals human nature in time of crisis, in all its variety. Alongside accounts of dreadful suffering and despair, we learn the venal diarist Samuel Pepys enjoyed what can best be described as a ‘good plague’ in 1664, sailing the Thames in a yacht, managing the Admiralty by day, and partying by night, for the privileged retreated to countryside. The 1720 epidemic that killed 100,000 in Marseille, prompted a flurry of English self-help books for those remaining in town, like that by Robert Samber who advocated smoking tobacco, using scented candles, and wearing silk-wrapped preventatives around the neck. During the 1832 cholera epidemic, conspiracy theorists accused the authorities of ‘burking’ – that is, using the crisis to produce corpses for surgeons to dissect. Satirical cartoons attacked London’s water companies for supplying contaminated water, and a poem related ‘how gracefully the dead dogs float’ in York’s polluted River Foss. 

Though the understanding of the biological vectors of transmission was in its infancy in the long eighteenth century, it was clear that cities, their buildings and rivers, were agents in spreading disease. Long-established methods of infection control – such as quarantine and the use of pest-houses – were gradually augmented with attempts to build a healthy environment. In her talk, Ann-Marie Akehurst will consider epidemics related to their urban settings. Drawing on London’s Great Plague, the Marseilles Plague and the nineteenth–century Cholera Pandemics, she will illustrate past and present resonances between the reactions of populations to epidemic disease. Ultimately she will argue epidemics require ambitious resilient cathedral thinking projecting architectural, and infrastructural, interventions, facilitating decades-long projects with in-built flexibility and redundancy.  

Ann-Marie Akehurst is an independent urban and architectural historian who has published on early modern architecture and national identity, sacred space, and the architecture of health. She is the Programmes officer and Trustee of The SAHGB. 

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.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

This lecture is part of a four-part series on Georgian Medicine and Science:

13 October: Dr Richard Mead: living in the broad sunshine of life

27 October: A Georgian Chemist: Humphry Davy 

4 November: The brothers Bell: emotion, war and surgical identity in late Georgian Britain

£3 members, £5 non-members

Geraldine Roberts joins us to discuss the story behind her critically acclaimed book, The Angel and the Cad: Love, Loss and Scandal in Regency Britain. It tells the fascinating true story of Catherine & William Long Wellesley, who were Britain’s first ever celebrity couple and the last owners of Wanstead House, the magnificent Palladian mansion built 1715-22 for Richard Child and demolished only a hundred years later. The Regency public were fascinated by Catherine and William because they were rich, glamorous and exciting. They kept the nation enthralled for two decades as the shocking twists and turns of their lives played out in the press – there was bankruptcy, exile and a scandalous court case that set a new precedent in English law.

Geraldine Roberts grew up in East London and worked in a bank for many years before pursuing her ambition as an historian and writer. In 2010, she obtained an MA in History (with distinction) at Queen Mary University of London. She is currently working on her second book. Her first book, The Angel and the Cad, was published by Macmillan in 2015 and received glowing reviews in the national press. It was book of the week in The Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Daily Mirror, as well as book of the month in BBC History Magazine and Saga Magazine, demonstrating its wide appeal. Copies of the book will be available to purchase at a special reduced rate on the evening.

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.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking