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 (£10 YGs)

The Palace of Westminster – home of Britain’s Houses of Parliament – is one of the country’s most famous and recognisable buildings. The current Palace complex, constructed in the mid-nineteenth century, has become so iconic that the original, medieval Palace has been largely forgotten in popular memory. In recent years, the University of York has undertaken several research projects to reveal more about the architectural history of the old Palace. Our speaker’s PhD, now in its final stages, focuses specifically on the development of the first Speaker’s House during the early nineteenth century.

In 1794, the Speaker of the House of Commons was granted the use of a large townhouse within the Palace complex. From 1802, this house was completely remodelled by celebrity architect James Wyatt, as part of a wider programme to expand and modernise the Palace complex. Wyatt made the bold decision to construct his new buildings in castellated Gothic style, thus breaking from more than a century of classical dominance in British public building projects. However, by the dawn of the Victorian era Wyatt’s reputation was in decline, and his work was unceremoniously swept away following the 1834 fire at Westminster.

In this presentation, Murray Tremellen will explain how Wyatt transformed the Speaker’s House to suit the social and political objectives of its occupants. He will also set the house into the wider context of contemporary architectural developments at Westminster, and will argue for the significance of Wyatt’s work as a landmark moment in the progress of the Gothic Revival in Britain.

Murray Tremellen is a PhD candidate in the Department of History of Art at the University of York. His PhD research explores the history of the first Speaker’s House from both political and architectural perspectives. His wider interests span eighteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture; his MA dissertation research on the architecture of the Southern Railway has recently been published. Before starting his PhD Murray worked for the National Trust, latterly as Assistant House Steward at Uppark House & Garden, West Sussex.

The talks starts at 6.30pm, doors open from 6.15pm.

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

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking.

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

(Image: Yale Center for British Art)

£25

John Moses will lead this two-hour walking tour of Richmond, which has possibly the finest selection of Georgian buildings of any of the London suburbs. We shall look at the fine Georgian buildings on Richmond Green including Maids of Honour Row and then go down Palace Lane and turn right to look at two of the outstanding villas facing the Thames and up to Richmond Bridge and then up Richmond Hill looking at a number of Georgian buildings before returning by the Vineyard to the Parish Church where the Walk will finish.

This event is for members and their guests.

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

£30

Since reopening to the public after a three-year restoration project and winning the Georgian Group Architectural Award for ‘Restoration of a Georgian Building in an Urban Setting’ in 2019, Pitzhanger Manor and Gallery has established itself as a place for creativity, debate and participation within Soane’s original county house. Members are invited to join us for a private tour of the manor, led by Director Clare Gough, including the Soane Restored exhibition, which focuses on the recreation of Soane’s decorative paint effects, the rebuilding of the spectacular light-filled conservatory and the restoration of the original stone features. The tour will begin with tea, coffee and cake in Soane’s Kitchen cafe.

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.

£15

Members are invited to join us in the lovely surrounds of the Fitzroy Square gardens (weather permitting) for our summer drinks. This is an opportunity for members to meet and socialise in a relaxed atmosphere.  

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.

£5 members/£7 non-members

Thomas Robins the Elder (1716–1770) recorded the country estates of the Georgian gentry – their orchards, Rococo gardens, and potagers – like no other, with both topographical accuracy and delightful artistry, often bordering his gouaches with entrancing tendrils, shells, leaves, and birds. Robins’s skill was honed by the delicacy required for his early career as a fan painter and is shown too in his exquisite paintings of butterflies, flowers, and birds. Cathryn will introduce the work of Robins through his paintings of gardens at Honington, Painswick and Woodside alongside his extraordinary record of Bath as it was transformed by John Wood the Elder. Her recent publication on Robins is the culmination of over 15 years research and is the first study on the artist since John Harris’s Gardens of Delight (1978). Cathryn will also expand on what it is like undertaking this type of research, how she had to turn detective and how she set out to visit every site depicted in Robins’s sketchbook (V&A Museum) in order to piece together the story of  this most curious of Rococo artists. The book has won critical acclaim with Robin Lane Fox proclaiming it a superb new study that should win a prize! 

Dr Cathryn Spence is a museum professional, lecturer and historic gardens and buildings consultant. After a career in London and Bath museums, including the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Building of Bath Museum, she is now Lord Lansdowne’s consultant Archivist and Curator at Bowood House, Wiltshire. She has published several books on the architectural and social history of Bath, most recently The Story of Bath (2016). Her study of Thomas Robins is the culmination of over fifteen years research. Cathryn has worked with the team at Painswick Rococo Garden, a site restored using Robins’s paintings from 1984, for the last 6 years advising on the continuing heritage and conservation of the garden.

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

(Image: Thomas Robins, Prospect of the Ornamental Garden and Long Water at Honington Hall, Warwickshire, 1759. Private Collection of Stephen and Amanda Clark)

£25

John Moses leads this three-hour walking tour of Walthamstow, which Pevsner says has more of its eighteenth-century houses surviving than any of its neighbours. This walk shall seek to discover the Georgian Village under the multicultural suburb before finishing at the William Morris Gallery, housed in the grade II* Water House, built 1762.

This event is for members and their guests.

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

£40

A study day in Norfolk focusing on the East Anglian-born architect William Donthorn. The day will commence at Silverstone Farm, North Elmham, with an illustrated talk by Rory O’Donnell on Donthorn, best known for his severe classical houses, of which only a few remain, that are rather Germanic in appearance. In the afternoon, there will be a tour of one or two local houses within a twenty-mile drive. Attendees to travel in own transport. Coffee and tea provided; participants should bring a picnic lunch.

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.

£40

This all-day tour, led by Dr Alexandra Loske (Curator, Royal Pavillion Projects) and Dr Sue Berry will explore both the internal and external spaces of George IV’s magnificent seaside palace, the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Winner of the Georgian Group Architectural Award 2019 for ‘Restoration of a Georgian Interior’ for The Saloon, this is the first time the Group will have a chance to view the completed restored decorative scheme.

When George, Prince of Wales leased a lodging house standing on a plot between the Steine (the town’s promenade) and East Street (the main road out of Brighton), he was already interested in playing with buildings, expensively.  To expand the house and grounds, he had to acquire more land. He decided to buy plots on the west side of East Street which in due course became a detached garden. Eventually he managed to get East Street closed and unite all of his landholding into one big plot.  At last, he had a site that he could develop as gardens, and build new facilities such as the superb Dome as a riding school and stables.  He now had space to enlarge the Pavilion and its southern service wing (mainly demolished). What we see today is a result of George’s determination to build a grand villa, and attain some privacy. Attendees to make their own lunch arrangements.

Dr Alexandra Loske is a German-British art historian with a particular interest in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century European art and architecture. The subject of her doctoral thesis was the use of colour in the Royal Pavilion, Brighton. Since 2016 Alexandra Loske has been the curator of the Royal Pavilion, where she regularly gives talks, lectures, and specialist tours. Alexandra has curated many temporary fine art exhibitions and permanent displays. Her most recent one – Designing and Enchanted Palace (2020-22) – focussed on the royal decorators John and Frederick Crace and their original designs for the Royal Pavilion. Alexandra Is the author of several academic and non-academic books and is currently working on a book about the Royal Pavilion interiors for Yale University Press.

Dr Sue Berry has been studying the history of Georgian seaside resorts for some time. Her articles about Brighton are mainly in the Journal of the Georgian Group, and the Collections of the Sussex Archeological Society. Many can down be downloaded free via the sites of both organisations. She is currently looking at how the economies functioned and just how different they were from other Georgian towns.  She also lectures, mainly nowadays on Zoom.

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.

£5 members/£7 non-members

In Don Juan, the poet Lord Byron describes England as a ‘low, newspaper, humdrum, lawsuit country’. He makes this statement in the middle of a series of stanzas about the dire consequences of being exposed for adultery, specifically ‘when, without regard to “Church and State,” / A wife makes, or takes, love in upright earnest’. This leads ineluctably, the narrator explains, to a courtroom and ‘A Verdict – grievous foe to those who cause it!’. This is typically followed by a public scandal, ‘when the delicacies of the law [fill] the Papers with their comments various’.

Adultery was widely accepted, and even expected, amongst the aristocracy in Georgian England, where arranged marriages fostered a culture of sexual tolerance. However, although this louche libertinism was vehemently denounced by from pulpits, debated in parliament, and consistently attacked in print – that did not stop the public eagerly demanding what Byron mockingly calls ‘tales of love unlawful’. Using Byron’s poem Don Juan as a focal lens, this talk looks at some of the adultery scandals of the early 1800s and the resultant criminal conversation trials, and explores the power of these publicized adultery trials to shape popular mental landscapes.

Emily Paterson-Morgan is an independent scholar and the Director of The Byron Society. She has published a number of articles on various aspects of Byron’s life and works, recently edited a special issue of The Byron Journal, and is currently researching Byron’s engagement with adultery discourses in English print culture. She is based in Dubai, UAE, where she works as Head of Publishing for Knowledge E.

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

£15 members/£18 non-members

The site of Fulham Palace has been occupied for over 5,000 years, probably because of its location next to an important crossing of the Thames. From 704 AD to 1973 it was the home of the Bishop of London and is one of the oldest estates in the country.

Fulham Palace Trust was established in 2011 to manage the buildings and gardens and make them accessible to the general public.   The Palace gardens and main building are open 7 days per week to the public free of charge and receive around 360,000 visits per annum. In addition to the museum and the gardens there is a café, a shop, an active and award-winning education programme, and a varied events and activities programme.

Fulham Palace has significant Georgian elements, from Bishop Sherlock’s grand dining room block dating to the 1750s, to Bishop Terrick’s gothic style renovations and garden landscaping of the 1770s and Bishop Howley’s elegant new façade of the 1820s.

This talk will be delivered by three members of the Fulham Palace team, Alexis Haslam, community archaeologist, Roxane Burke, collections and conservation officer, and Sian Harrington, chief executive.

Sian will outline some of the previous restoration work to the Georgian elements of the building, including the restoration of Bishop Sherlock’s room in 2006-07 – an approach which is now being re-examined.  Roxane will talk about a recent research project on Georgian wallpaper removed in the 1980s from the partitions in the great hall attic. Alexis will talk about some of the exciting discoveries he made as the in-house archaeologist on the last restoration project (2017-19), which has given the Trust a much greater understanding of the people behind the various phases of remodelling at the Palace, including Bishops of London, architects and craftspeople.

Sian Harrington, chief executive, joined Fulham Palace Trust in November 2011. She holds a degree in Anthropology, an MA in Museum Studies and an MBA. She has been working in museums and heritage since her first role as a volunteer collections assistant at Durham University Oriental Museum in 1986. Previous roles have included ten years as a property manager in the National Trust, and as a curator and heritage development manager in local authority museums.

Alexis Haslam, community archaeologist, joined Fulham Palace Trust in May 2017. He holds a BA in History and is a Member of the Institute for Archaeologists. He began working in archaeology upon graduating in 2000, working his way up from a field technician to a project officer. He has directed and published numerous archaeological excavations including his most recent work ‘Tales from the Vaults and other Newington Horror Stories’. After 16 years he left Pre-Construct Archaeology to join Fulham Palace Trust and is currently working on writing up the Palace’s long and complex history for a monograph due to be published in 2024.

Roxane Burke, collections and conservation officer, started working for Fulham Palace Trust in August 2020. She holds two degrees (Physical Geography & Astronomy and Archaeology, the latter from University College London). She stayed on at UCL to gain her MA in Principles of Conservation and an MSc in Conservation for Archaeology and Museums. She did a 10-month internship as an archaeological conservator at the Museum of London, focusing primarily on the remedial treatment of organic materials. Her previous role was as a conservation assistant working for UCL Culture repackaging and condition checking objects from the Petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology.

The talks starts at 6.30pm, doors open from 6.15pm.

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.

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

£10 – Young Georgians

Come and join a late afternoon walking tour from Portland Place up to Park Crescent and through Park Square Gardens before traversing the Inner and Outer Circles of Regent’s Park. A walk in which you’ll see many of John Nash’s celebrated works in the form of the huge sweeping Regency Terraces that line the park as well as the work of Decimus Burton, including the Burton residence ‘The Holme’. Regent’s Park was originally called ‘The Regent’s Park’ as it was intended to be a pleasure garden proposed by The Prince Regent (the future King George IV) and the stuccoed terraces built in the 1820s represent the high status of the area and its grandeur. Of the private villas that are scattered throughout the park, some have survived, while others have been demolished. There will be plenty to see for those Young Georgians with an interest in the early 1800s and its architecture.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking.

This event is open to Young Georgians only. 

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

£70/£35 (student ticket)

Following successful symposia held by the Group in previous years, on the Adam Brothers, James Gibbs, Women and Architecture and Georgian London Revisited (online), this year’s symposium will address Architecture and Health in the long eighteenth century. Appropriately, it will be held in James Gibbs’s Great Hall at St Bart’s, an institution celebrating its 900th anniversary.

A series of short papers by both established and younger scholars, and from a range of disciplines, will examine how and where medicine was studied and debated, how knowledge was disseminated and how healthcare was provided in what spaces and through what mechanisms.

The symposium will be held from 10am to 5pm and will be led by Ann Marie Akehurst. Tickets include a buffet lunch and reception. A limited number of student tickets are available here.

9.30 am Arrival/Registration
10.00 am – Welcome

SESSION 1 – TRANSMISSION OF MEDICO-SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE

Matthew Walker
The Architecture of English Anatomy Theatres 1660-1800

Janet Stiles Tyson
Elizabeth Blackwell’s A Curious Herbal and Bart’s

Danielle Wilkens
Health in the Academy: Jefferson’s University of Virginia and Landscapes of Inequity

SESSION 2 – OUTSIDE THE INSTITUTIONS: HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENT

Joana Balsa de Pinho
Health, Architecture and Urbanism in the early Modern Era: from prevention to treatment

Allan Brodie
Georgian Margate: a landscape and townscape of health

India Knight
The Spa at Hampstead

SESSION 3 – PLACES OF CONFINEMENT

Anna Jamieson
‘Bedlam’s Picture Gallery’: Health, Performance, and the Built Environment at Bethlem

Leslie Topp
Early Asylums and the curious Appeal of Prison Designs

Marina Ini
John Howard and the Quarantine Centres of the Eighteenth-century Mediterranean

Sarah Akibogun
The (Other) Woman in The Attic: Considering Post-Colonial Lenses on the Treatment of Madness in Georgian England

SESSION 4 – ENDURING HOSPITAL SPACES

Tessa Murdoch
French Protestant Hospital in Clerkenwell, 1742

Elisabeth Einberg
Hogarth’s Use of Architectural Space to bring home the message

Dan Cruickshank
Bart’s Great Hall

Will Palin
Bart’s Heritage

5pm Drinks reception

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking.

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

£15 members/£18 non-members

John Wood, the most successful town planner of English eighteenth-century architects, was ferociously eccentric. The very idea that Bath, his grand artefact and a byword for classical order, should owe as much to the prehistoric stone circle at Stonehenge and the Second temple in Jerusalem strains credibility, but that is the historic truth presented here through Wood’s own writing and a whole body of archival material. This lecture by Timothy Mowl will consider the improbable sources that inspired Wood in his creation of Georgian Bath.

Professor Timothy Mowl is an architectural and landscape historian. He is Emeritus Professor of History of Architecture and Designed Landscapes at the University of Bristol. He is also Director of AHC Consultants. He was awarded the Hawksmoor Medal of the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain in 1987, was elected a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London in 1993, and served as a member of Council of the Garden History Society between 2002 and 2007. He has published over thirty books on architectural history, landscape and garden history, biography, planning and conservation. His latest book is a re-issue and update of his 1988 study on the architect John Wood of Bath.

Copies of the newly illustrated and revised edition of Architect of Obsession: John Wood and the Creation of Georgian Bath (first published 1988) will be available for purchase on the night at the discounted price of £30 (cash or cheque only).

The talks starts at 6.30pm, doors open from 6.15pm.

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.

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

£15 members/£18 non-members

Life in the court of the House of Stuart has been shrouded in mystery: the first half of the century overshadowed by the fall and execution of Charles I, the second half in the complete collapse of the House itself.

Lost to time is the extraordinary contribution the Stuarts made to the fabric of sovereignty. Provost of Gresham College and Chair of the National Lottery Heritage Fund Simon Thurley takes us from Royston and Newmarket, where James I appropriated most of the town centre as a sort of rough-and-ready royal housing estate, to the steamy Turkish baths at Whitehall where Charles II seduced his mistresses.  The everyday lives of the monarchy is presented through the buildings in which they lived and the objects they commissioned, bringing to life the Stuart age.

The talks starts at 6.30pm, doors open from 6.15pm.

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.

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