Event Type : Lecture

£15 members/£18 non-members

The architect, collector and teacher John Soane (1753–1837) did not mince his words. During his tenure as Professor of Architecture at the Royal Academy in London, he was openly critical or complimentary of other architects as he saw fit. The work of the playwright-turned-architect John Vanbrugh was quite at odds with Soane’s own output, and yet Soane admired Vanbrugh enormously for his dynamic and inventive compositions, lauding his ‘genius’, ‘his bold flights of irregular fancy’, and hailing him as ‘the Shakespeare of architects’.

It is perhaps unsurprising that Soane should so venerate Vanbrugh’s dramatic flair, given that Soane cherished the theatre, and even owned four volumes of Vanbrugh’s plays. Subtle layering and hanging pendentive arches in Soane’s own work allude to his fascination for the physical construction of the theatre, notably the proscenium arch and stage legs. And so to find an architect whose work so eloquently married Soane’s twin passions for architecture and theatre was sure to result in his admiration.

This lecture will focus on Soane’s devotion to Vanbrugh. We will consider Soane’s own words on the subject from his Royal Academy lectures, and we will peruse the ten exquisite Royal Academy lecture drawings made by Soane’s office to illustrate Vanbrugh’s best-known works.

The talk 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.

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

Across the visual arts in France and Britain in the 1820s and 1830s a dynamic culture of fashion was taking shape. Wide-ranging in taste and driven by a quest for the new, fashion flourished in the period’s expansive print production, while the fine arts negotiated demands for novelty more paradoxically, partly by reviving styles from the past. Following the publication of her new book, Susan L. Siegfried will argue that the intersections between fashion, costume, and art in these pivotal decades embody the fractured conditions of early nineteenth-century modernity.

The talk starts at 6.30pm.

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

Patrick Baty will explain how one can learn what paint colours were used during this period. The treatment of panelled rooms – in particular, the disposition of colour – will be discussed, with examples of how many modern decorators misunderstand this and produce nonsensical results. The ‘Good Taste Brigade’ would have one believe that all early paints were ‘chalky’. This is far from true and the advantages of a finish with a sheen will be explained.

During the 18th century ready-mixed paint colours were sold by the colourman and Patrick will outline those being offered. The prices charged for various colours will be given and, it will be seen, that there was a distinct hierarchy based on cost.

Patrick will then outline the conventions behind the use of colour in certain parts of the house with examples taken from recent restoration. projects. Patrick will show some examples of quite unusual decorative schemes that he has uncovered and also indicate that there are occasions where a ‘pure’ approach to redecoration might be disregarded.

The talk starts at 6.30pm.

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

PLEASE NOTE: THE DATE OF THIS TALK HAS BEEN CHANGED TO THE 16TH NOVEMBER

Painted interiors, narratives spilling over walls and ceilings, can unlock the sensory worlds of the British Isles in the 17th century. Murals of this period served to educate, persuade and entertain, conveying messages on politics, virtue and morality in modes that were both tragic and comic. Architectural spaces were transformed into Olympian realms, Biblical settings, imagined landscapes or estates.

Whilst there are hundreds of examples of Baroque mural paintings across the British Isles, only a fraction of them are intact today. They include the extensive painted interiors of Chatsworth House, Derbyshire; Orazio and Artemisia Gentileschi’s ceiling and Louis Laguerre’s walls at Marlborough House, London; and Antonio Verrio’s enfilade at Burghley House, Lincolnshire, among many others. Following the publication of her new book, Lydia Hamlett will explore how these paintings were designed to appeal to our emotions through the five senses, and reframes the British Baroque interior as an active, imaginative space.

The talk starts at 6.30pm.

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

Photo Credit: Michael Bailie

£15 members/£18 non-members

The winner of the award for Restoration of a Georgian Interior, the Tapestry Drawing Room at Castle Howard is a completely new architectural treatment to a room which was destroyed by fire in 1940. The room had been left as an empty shell of charred stonework ever since. The brief was to restore the room to what the architect of the house Sir John Vanbrugh (d.1726) would have created and to incorporate the four Vanderbank tapestries which were designed and woven for the room in 1706. Architect Francis Terry, Clunie Fretton, classically trained sculptor, carver & gilder, and Philip Gaches, master plasterer, will discuss their work on this wonderful project.

The talk 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

Photo credit: Francis Terry & Associates

Vanbrugh has long been a source of inspiration for architects of very different persuasions. Among the most significant in the context of twentieth-century architecture were Alison and Peter Smithson and Robert Venturi. Although close in age, the Smithsons and Venturi advanced what are conventionally seen as diametrically opposing architectural philosophies in Postmodernism and Brutalism respectively, though both shied away from these respective monikers.

Where Brutalism constituted a doubling down on modernist tenets via its structural honesty, extreme truth to materials and, as was especially the case in the Smithsons’ work, progressive social programmes, Postmodernism embraced, to use Venturi’s characterisation, complexity and contradiction, rejecting modernist abstraction and embracing historical styles and aesthetics of the everyday.

Owen Hopkins will reconstruct what attracted such seemingly diverging architects to Vanbrugh’s architecture, how they saw it – and the different ways it shaped their own work.

The talk starts at 6.30pm.

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

Photo Credit: 20th Century Architecture

£15 members/£18 non-members

Please note that the date of this talk has changed to the 8th December

2026 marks the bicentenary of University College London – 200 years since it was founded as London’s first university, and the first in the country to open its doors to all, irrespective of religious belief. This lecture tells the story of its first architectural expression: the domed Greek Revival building of 1827–9 designed by William Wilkins which, then as now, stood as a symbol of the institution’s democratic principles. The talk considers (among other things) the progressive philosophy – social and educational, as well as architectural – that lay behind Wilkins’s design; the terrible damage sustained during bombing raids in 1940–1; and the building’s subsequent restoration by the arch-neoclassicist Sir Albert Richardson, one of the founders of the Georgian Group

The talk 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

Photo Credit: UCL Media Services – University College London