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...

£15

The Georgian Group is holding a series of lectures which will explore aspects of the Georgian architecture of a number of towns and cities in the context of their social and economic history. This lecture will focus on Bury St Edmunds.

Caroline Knight is an architectural historian specialising in British Architecture of the 16th-18th centuries. She has an MA from the Courtauld Institute of Art and is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London.

This lecture forms part of the Six Georgian Cities lecture series. For information on the series as a whole, click here. Non-members welcome. Doors open 6pm, lecture starts 6.30pm (wine included with ticket).

Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT

£90

All day (inc. lunch)

Barford Park is a Grade II* red-brick house originally built as a two-storey farmhouse. The house was remodelled around 1710 for the Jeanes family and an attic storey and Baroque side wings were added circa 1740. The interior is simple, albeit elegant, with period features such as panelling and cornices. The house was restored by the Stancomb family, who owned it from 1953 to 1987, and more recently by its current owners.

Hatch Court, in the parish of Hatch Beauchamp, is a Grade I-listed, Bath Stone, Palladian mansion built circa 1755 by John Collins, a wool merchant, to the designs of the gentleman architect Thomas Prowse. The house comprises a central two-storey block with a three-storey tower on each corner; single-storey quandrant wings dating from the early 19thcentury extend north-west and north-east from the main block. The south façade has a ground-floor loggia which forms the main entrance to the house. The interior contains significant mid 18th-century rococo plasterwork.

*£10 discount when booked before 31 January 2019 (regular price £90)

£15

Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day, publishing A Vindication of the Rights of Women, travelling to revolutionary France and living through the Terror, having an illegitimate daughter, and marrying William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of 38. This talk will explore her fascinating life and how, although often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention.

Claire Tomalin is an award-winning author of a number of highly acclaimed biographies, including ones on Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. A former literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, she is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Vice-President of the English PEN.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine)

THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED

£75

All day

With 12th- and 15th-century origins, much of the core of Burton Constable Hall was built in the 1560s by Sir John Constable as an Elizabethan prodigy house. In the 1760s, William Constable remodelled the interiors, commissioning designs by architects including John Carr and Timothy Lightoler. The park surrounding the house was landscaped by Capability Brown between 1772 and 1782 and further redecoration of the interiors took place in the 19th century. The day will involve a tour of the house, including the private family apartments, and of the stables, which have recently been extensively restored and contain a varied range of stabling as well as accommodation for groom and servants. Members will also have the the opportunity to view some of the architectural drawings held in the archives. We will be joined by the Hall’s Curator, Philippa Wood, and its Director, Susan Hopkinson.

Outline for visit

Intro & talk – by Director, Susan Hopkinson, and Curator, Philippa Wood (who will guide throughout the day)

Tour the 30 rooms of the Hall, including servants’ quarters, family apartments and the Waterloo Room with its unique wallpaper created to commemorate Wellington’s famous victory in 1815

Lunch (with wine) in the Rose Room of the North Wing – a private grace and favour apartment never open to the public

Tour the recently restored magnificent Stable Block with its four carriage houses, extensive stabling for hunters and draught horses and accommodation for grooms and servants and access to unrestored areas not open to the public

Tea and a special viewing of the private architectural drawings from the Burton Constable archives

£15

The Georgian Group is holding a series of lectures which will explore aspects of the Georgian architecture of a number of towns and cities in the context of their social and economic history. This lecture will focus on Exeter.

Rosemary Yallop is an independent researcher and writer on local and architectural history, with a particular focus on British domestic architecture. She has published on the topics of John Nash, the Picturesque in Architecture and Italianate architectural style in Britain.

This lecture forms part of the Six Georgian Cities lecture series. For information on the series as a whole, click here.
Non-members welcome.

Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT. Doors open 6pm, lecture starts 6.30pm (wine included with ticket)

£35.00

Morning, time TBC

Led by Sinclair Johnston. Originally common land for the parishes of Battersea and Clapham, Clapham Common is one of London’s largest open spaces. Surrounded by fine Georgian and Victorian mansions, William Hewer, Samuel Pepys’ manservant and clerk, was one of the first to build on land adjacent to the common, with Pepys dying in 1703 in the house Hewer built. The land was drained in the 1760s and from the 1790s onwards fine houses were built around the common as fashionable dwellings for wealthy business people in what was then a village detached from metropolitan London. J. M. W. Turner painted “View on Clapham Common” between 1800 and 1805, showing that even though the common had been drained, it still remained “quite a wild place”. Starting at the grade II*-listed Holy Trinity Church, built 1776, the walk will follow an 1849 map of the common, taking in a variety of Georgian buildings before ending with refreshments in the remnant of a 1770 mansion on the south side of the park.

£15

The Georgian Group is holding a series of lectures which will explore aspects of the Georgian architecture of a number of towns and cities in the context of their social and economic history. This lecture will focus on Bristol.

Andrew Foyle is an independent historian. He was previously a local history researcher at Bristol City Museums and Art Gallery and has revised the most recent edition of the Pevsner for Somerset North and Bristol.

This lecture forms part of the Six Georgian Cities lecture series. For information on the series as a whole, click here.
Non-members welcome. Art Workers’ Guild, 6 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AT. Doors open 6pm, lecture starts 6.30pm (wine included with ticket).

£25

Stephen Bull leads. Starting at Angel station, this walk will take in sites such as Saddlers Wells, Myddelton Square and Exmouth Market, before finshing at St John’s Square, Farringdon. Covering both the Lloyd Baker Estate, laid out between 1820 and the early 1840s, and the work of Berthold Lubetkin and the Tecton Group in the 1930s, we will consider how these two concepts, 100 years apart, both worked towards housing London’s growing population.

£25

Stephen Bull leads. Starting at the Tower of London, this walk will explore the great industrial power that was the ‘Pool of London’, that stretch of the Thames where all imported cargoes had to be delivered for inspection and assessment by Customs Officers, before making our way towards the former Ratcliffe Highway, site of the infamous Ratcliffe Highway Murders of 1811.

£10.00

Lynette White examines the reality of bad manners in the 18th century and explores how they were used for comedic or dramatic effect by authors from Jane Austen to François Choderlos de Laclos. Lynette is a PhD student at Birkbeck researching the use and rules of social interaction within the more private and informal areas of the French court during the reign of Louis XV.

All welcome. Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine).

SOLD OUT

All day (inc. lunch)

Boughton House, Kettering, Northamptonshire

We are delighted to announce that the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry has generously offered to welcome Georgian Group members to his family seat at Boughton following his retirement as Group President in 2018. Originally a Tudor house with a Great Hall, much of the present house is the work of Ralph Montagu, later 1st Duke of Montagu, who inherited it in 1683. Boughton’s chateau-like exterior has led to the house being termed ‘The English Versailles’ and it contains an equally impressive suite of Baroque state rooms with a fine collection of furniture, tapestries, porcelain and works of art.The visit will involve a tour of the house and gardens and lunch.
This member event will be strictly ticketed. There are two ticket options:

• Free: members to make their own way to Boughton
• £10: coach transport for members between Kettering Station and Boughton House

Tickets will only be allocated to members. We reserve the right to cancel tickets requested by those that do not qualify.

£25.00

Stephen Bull leads. Starting at Tower Bridge, this walk will take in the south side of the Thames as we make our way to The Globe Theatre and will explore the Georgian history of this stretch of the river.

£15.00

For centuries, Britain’s country houses were the exclusive preserve of the traditional landed gentry of lords and ladies. Starting in the late 19th century, however, an entirely different kind of proprietor began to take up residence as American money came across the Atlantic. This talk will uncover the ways in which American industrialists, self-made men and eligible heiresses helped to save British country houses and how this unlikely juxtaposition of two very different cultures changed the architecture, society and character of our country houses forever.

Clive Aslet is an architectural historian, author and former editor of Country Life. He has published extensively on various aspects of British architecture and life, from country houses to war memorials.

Doors open 6.15pm, talk starts 6.30pm (inc. wine).

£90

All day (inc. lunch at Claydon House).

Chilton House was largely rebuilt from 1739 onwards by Richard Carter, Chief Justice of South Wales, on the site of an earlier 16th-century house owned by the Croke family. Based on William Winde’s Buckingham House (1702-5), the house is constructed of red brick with stone dressings and has four storeys, including basement. The east and west elevations are of 9 bays; the more elaborate east front has a rusticated basement and stone Doric pilasters flanking the outer pair of bays. Since 1739, the Grade II* house has remained within the same family, albeit through a complex descent. The present owner, Sir Henrey Aubrey-Fletcher Bt, has restored the fine plasterwork and staircases of the 18th-century interiors and the house is currently run as a luxury private nursing home.

Claydon House, although in the National Trust’s custodianship, still remains the home of the Verney family, who have lived at Claydon since the 15th century and currently run the estate, garden and stable court enterprises. The present house, grade I-listed, dates from the 1750s and was commissioned by the 2nd Earl Verney. The rather austere exterior belies the extravagant rococo interiors, with ornate carving and chinoiserie, which were created by Luke Lightfoot. In the 1760s a second wing was built, connected to the first one by a colonnaded rotunda surmounted by a cupola. After Verney’s death in 1792, his niece Mary, Lady Fermanagh, inherited and pulled down the rotunda and second wing, thereby reducing the house to its present size.

*£10 discount when booked before 31 January (regular price £90)

Andrew Wells leads

£60.00

All day (inc. lunch).

With Roman and Saxon origins, Lancaster gained its first charter as a market town and borough in 1193. In the 18th and early 19th centuries a number of important buildings were erected during a period of prosperity, which reached its apogee in the early 19th century when the town’s port became one of the busiest in the UK. This was short lived, however, and the remainder of the 19th century was time of economic decline with little construction taking place, which has left Lancaster with an exceptional range of buildings dating between 1715 and 1830. John Martin Robinson leads this walking tour, which will take in the castle, Music Room and Judges’ lodgings among others. Dr John Martin Robinson leads.