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...

£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.

To ensure entry to the event, please purchase a ticket in advance. If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list; more tickets may be released at a later date. We cannot guarantee entry on the night to those who arrive without having booked a ticket in advance.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£5 – Young Georgians

Join Dr Amy Boyington and Annabel Sim for a guided tour of historic Greenwich and Blackheath. Meeting at the Chapel of St Peter and St Paul we take in the many historic gems dotted around the area, including the Old Royal Naval College, the Queen’s House, Vanbrugh Castle, through Greenwich Park to Rangers Lodge, and across the Heath to the Paragon.

Finishing our tour in the pretty village of Blackheath, YGs will then be invited to Amy’s house for a few drinks.

Members may wish to visit either the Painted Hall (ticketed) or the Queen’s House (free) before meeting for the tour.

This tour involves a lot of walking so please wear comfortable shoes!

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 (£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.

To ensure entry to the event, please purchase a ticket in advance. If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list; more tickets may be released at a later date. We cannot guarantee entry on the night to those who arrive without having booked a ticket in advance.

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.

To ensure entry to the event, please purchase a ticket in advance. If tickets have sold out for this event, please email members@georgiangroup.org.uk to be added to the waiting list; more tickets may be released at a later date. We cannot guarantee entry on the night to those who arrive without having booked a ticket in advance.

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking