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 – Young Georgians

By the banks of the wending river Cam, sits the resplendent city of Cambridge. Home to the University of Cambridge since the beginning of the thirteenth century when some enlightened scholars at Oxford fled their squalid surrounds and murderous townspeople to found a new seat of learning in the boggy fenland. Here the colleges which make up the university have through the centuries flourished and over the ensuing centuries erected many fine buildings (some of them even finished).

This YG tour will take in Peterhouse, the oldest Cambridge College, which has a number of fine Georgian Buildings and the grave of the last man in Cambridge to wear an eighteenth-century powdered wig. We shall marvel at the glorious Fitzwilliam Museum of George Basevi, gape agog at the classical delights of Downing College, stand in awe of James Gibbs’s Senate House, coo delightedly at Christopher Wren’s first ever building, the Chapel at Pembroke College and ogle splutteringly at his splendid (and now eponymous) library at Trinity College. As we waft elegantly through the winding academical streets other architectural delights of Georgian (and medieval) Cambridge shall loom magnificently into your view.  The tour shall be led by some genuine Cambridge students (we kindly ask you not to feed or pet them) who shall intone in a convincing manner some possibly genuine facts about Cambridge. Those left standing shall be rewarded with a famous Fitzbillies Chelsea bun.

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.

£10

If tickets have sold out, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list; further tickets may be made available closer to the time and those on the waiting list will be given first preference. 

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking.

£25

Known to Georgian London as the Surry Side, London’s Southbank at Waterloo was home in 1773 to Astley’s Amphitheatre, where Captain Astley rode his horse in the circle or ‘ring’ which is now considered as the birthplace of the world’s first modern circus. From the Georgian Pleasure Gardens of Vauxhall and Southwark, the Southbank was born and is now the home of contemporary art, artists, writers, performers and entertainers – the Southbank centre, National Theatre, Haywood Gallery, Tate Modern and the Old and Young Vic Theatres. This walk by Stephen Bull will take members to the humblest of all Georgian buildings at the heart of the Southbank, which are rare 1826 survivors from the wrecker’s ball and slum clearance of the 1970s and are now amongst the most desirable and expensive Georgian properties in this part of London.

Part of a series of four walks from Vauxhall to Southwark. London’s South Bank has always been London’s pleasure ground and Stephen Bull, a long-time resident of the area and a repairer of Georgian buildings, will be looking at the Georgian development of the South Bank from Vauxhall to Southwark in a series of walks to enlighten, educate and amuse. The other walks in the series are:

2 March: Vauxhall to Kennington

13 April: Kennington to Lambeth North

4 May: Lambeth North to Waterloo

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking.

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.

£12.50 – Young Georgians

Spencer House is a rare survival of an eighteenth-century London aristocratic mansion. Built for the first Earl Spencer between 1756 and 1766, the house and it’s exquisitely crafted interiors are the work of two major architects, John Vardy and James ‘Athenian’ Stuart, and thus reflect the transition from the Palladian style toward neo-classicism.

After 1926 the building, with most of its original contents and fittings removed, was let to a series of commercial tenants and entered a period of neglect and decline. In 1985 the lease was acquired by RIT Capital Partners plc and an ambitious ten-year restoration project was carried out, under the chairmanship of Lord Rothschild. A large team of specialist craftspeople, historians, conservators and designers brought the interiors of the State Rooms back to their late-eighteenth century splendour. Spencer House is now regularly open to the public for tours and as a venue for private event hire.

Victoria Wilson, Collections Manager of Spencer House, will be kindly hosting this tour for Young Georgians. The visit may be followed by food/drinks nearby.

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.

£15 members/£18 non-members

Until recently, the mid 1680s in the life of John Vanbrugh, architect of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard and general ‘Rockstar’ of the English Baroque, were missing from public knowledge. However, in 2000, Robert Williams established that Vanbrugh spent that time working as a Factor for the East India Company in Mughal Surat. Simultaneously, Vanbrugh’s design process has long been something of a mystery: not only the extraordinary scale of his buildings and their eccentric synthesis of forms, but the pioneering landscapes in which they are set. These have been loosely attributed to the variety of forms that Vanbrugh witnessed throughout his career as a political prisoner in France, playwright and herald, as well as a growing interest in the work Palladio. In this talk, building on clues in Vanbrugh’s 1711 Church Proposals, letters and contemporary travel accounts, Rory Fraser will suggest that the confluence between East and West in Surat contributed to a fundamental ‘emboldening’ of Vanbrugh’s later design.

Rory Fraser studied English at Oxford where he wrote his thesis on the relationship between the pastoral poetry of Alexander Pope and landscape design of William Kent. On graduating, he wrote ‘Follies: An Architectural Journey’ for Zuleika Books which was described as a ‘compendium of joy’ by The Times, ‘blithely enjoyable’ with ‘charm, amusement and light touch erudition’ by The Spectator, and compared to Evelyn Waugh’s travel writing by the Wall Street Journal. Last year, Rory completed an MPhil in Architectural History at Cambridge on John Vanbrugh’s time in Mughal India. He lives in London where he divides his time between writing, lecturing and painting architectural commissions.

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 YGs only

Young Georgians are invited to spend an evening at 6 Fitzroy Square as the muralist Alan Dodd discusses his career and work.

Alan Dodd works as a designer and mural painter, generally in historic and sensitive architectural settings, as well as providing new work ‘in keeping’. He attended Maidstone College of Art and then the Painting School at the Royal Academy. He has been painting murals since the 1970s.

Projects have included the Pompeiian ceiling decoration in the New Picture Room at Sir John Soane’s Museum, reinstating the trompe l’oeil decoration on John Vardy’s balustrade for the great staircase at Spencer House, and the recreation of three large landscape canvasses after lost works by Zucchi for the Great Eating Room at Home House, 20 Portman Square. A special commission involved the creation of two large grisaille panels of classical figure groups for the central rotunda of the new Palladian house at Tusmore Park, Bicester, designed by the Whitfield and Lockwood partnership.

As well as the fifty-foot Cross set up outside Westminster Cathedral for Advent in 2000 to mark the Millennium, Alan Dodd also designs historicist interiors, small architectural features and garden buildings. He lectures on the history of furniture and decoration and, in 2004, he held an exhibition at the Georgian Group premises at 6 Fitzroy Square of his travel paintings featuring architectural subjects from the Grand Tour, which he created over a span of twenty years.

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

This talk is for Young Georgians only.

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 (£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)