Events

£3 members, £5 non-members

The actress and singer Kitty Clive (1711-1785) was a star of the London stage for over 20 years; singing powered her ascent and was foundational to her success as she came to dominate spoken as well as musical comedy. Her musical voice helped her to become a champion of British song, of patriotism, and of propriety. However, in the 1740s critical opinion turned against Clive and her reputation suffered a sharp decline. With the help of David Garrick, she managed to salvage her career at the expense of her legacy; she quit serious song and took to caricaturing herself on stage, winning audiences back by disparaging her earlier achievements. This talk will explore the highs and lows of an extraordinary life and career in the context of performance history and star production in 18th-century Britain.

Berta Joncus is a Senior Lecturer in Music at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on celebrity culture and the role of the performer in creating musical works. Her particular interest is in the 18th-century British and European music. In addition to teaching, she presents regularly for BBC radio and television, the English National Opera, the Barbican and Early Music Music festivals in the UK and the USA, and her book Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster was published in 2019.

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

£3 members, £5 non-members

In 1734, Mary Howard, dowager Duchess of Norfolk, commissioned James Gibbs to build her a sumptuous new terraced house in Arlington Street, overlooking Green Park. In common with many of London’s Georgian town houses, the building was partially demolished during the twentieth century when it was converted into a clubhouse for the Royal Overseas League. As a result, the history of the building and its fascinating female patron has so far received little attention. This lecture takes as its starting point the complex personal history of Mary Howard, a devout Catholic and Jacobite sympathiser, who shocked society by separating from her husband in 1730. It then attempts a reconstruction of the house, contextualising its function and meaning within Mary’s life, ambitions, and concerns.

Juliet Learmouth is a final-year doctoral candidate at Birkbeck College, University of London, working on a School of Arts funded research project supervised by Professor Kate Retford.  Her thesis examines the relationship between elite women and the London town house during the first half of the eighteenth century. It aims is to answer two reciprocal questions: What can the experiences of elite women tell us about the design, construction, use and perception of the West End town house in London during this period? And conversely, what can the West End town house tell us about the lives and roles of those elite women? Her article reassessing William Kent’s town house, 44 Berkeley Square, from the perspective of its patron, Lady Isabella Finch, was published in the 2017 issue of The Georgian Group Journal. 

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

£3 members, £5 non-members

This talk will illustrate the extraordinary international networks resulting from the diaspora of more than 200,000 refugees who left France in the late seventeenth century to join communities already in exile spread far and wide. First-generation Huguenot refugees included hundreds of trained artists, designers and craftsmen. Beyond the French borders, they raised the quality of design and workshop practice, passing on skills to their apprentices; sons, godsons, cousins, and to successive generations, who continued to dominate output in the luxury trades. Although silver and silks are the best-known fields with which Huguenot settlers are associated, their significant contribution to architecture, ceramics, design, clock and watchmaking, engraving, furniture, woodwork, sculpture, portraiture, and art education provides fascinating insight into the motivation and resolve of this highly skilled diaspora. Thanks to a sophisticated network of Huguenot merchants, retailers, and bankers who financed their production, their wares reached a global market. 

Tessa Murdoch is Research Curator, Rosalinde and Arthur Gilbert Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum. Her forthcoming V&A book on Huguenot Refugee Art and Culture 1530-1780 (to be published in October 2021) was her focus as Getty Rothschild Fellow 2019 in Los Angeles and Waddesdon. Tessa has forty years curatorial experience at the Museum of London from 1981 and at the V&A since 1990 where she has worked in the Furniture, Sculpture, Metalwork and Ceramics Collections. Tessa is a fellow of the Society of Antiquaries, a trustee of the Huguenot Museum, Rochester and of the Idlewild Trust. 

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: The V&A)

£3 members/£5 non-members

Stormy father-son relationships were a defining feature of life for the first four Georges, as kings and princes exchanged private insults and public snubs. This talk will explore the fights and feuds and domestic disharmonies that beset life at the Georgian court.

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.

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

£3 members, £5 non-members

This talk will tell the untold story of the men who shaped Britain’s gardens, with help from a recently unearthed book of handwritten notes by young gardeners in support of their applications to be received into the Horticultural Society’s training scheme at their Chiswick Garden in the 1820s. Some of these men went on to work on Britain’s finest country estates, while others ended up tending more modest gardens or found themselves in exotic locations around the glove. Nevertheless, these previously hidden figures played a central role in the history of British horticulture and helped to shape the way we garden today. 

Fiona Davison is Head of Libraries and Exhibitions at the Royal Horticultural Society. Her book, The Hidden Horticulturists: The Untold Story of the Men who Shaped Britain’s Gardens, was published in 2019.

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

This lecture is part of our Georgian Gardens and Landscapes series. The full list of lectures in the series is as follows:

Tuesday 2 March – Hidden Horticulturists

Tuesday 9 March – Marble Hill – A Garden of Grottos and Groves

Tuesday 16 March – William Kent: Garden Designer, Architect, Interior Designer

Tuesday 23 March – Vauxhall, Sex & Entertainment: The Invention of the Urban Pleasure Garden

Tuesday 30 March – Welsh Gardens and the Grand Tour

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

£3 members/£5 non-members

Henrietta Howard, mistress of George II and later Countess of Suffolk, created Marble Hill house in the 1720s as a retreat from court life and as a place to entertain her elite circle of influential cultural, intellectual and political friends. This was a time of significant change in garden designs and Howard’s friendship with Alexander Pope, Lord Bathurst, Lord Peterborough and Lord Ilay, meant that her garden at Marble Hill was influenced by some of the most fashionable garden enthusiasts of the time. This talk will explore how the garden was created and who might have been involved in its design.

Emily Parker is a Landscape Advisor at English Heritage. She specialises in garden history and designed landscape conservation. Emily’s primary research interests are garden design in the eighteenth century, including the role of Alexander Pope, ‘Capability’ Brown and Humphry Repton. Emily has also researched and written interpretation content for many English Heritage sites including Eltham Palace, Kirby Hall, Mount Grace Priory and Wrest Park. She has also produced Conservation Management Plans for English Heritage gardens including Belsay Hall, Marble Hill and Walmer Castle.

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

This lecture is part of our Georgian Gardens and Landscapes series. The full list of lectures in the series is as follows:

Tuesday 2 March – Hidden Horticulturists

Tuesday 9 March – Marble Hill – A Garden of Grottos and Groves

Tuesday 16 March – William Kent: Garden Designer, Architect, Interior Designer

Tuesday 23 March – Vauxhall, Sex & Entertainment: The Invention of the Urban Pleasure Garden

Tuesday 30 March – Welsh Gardens and the Grand Tour

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

£3 members, £5 non-members

William Kent (1685-1748) was one of those all-round designers, like Bernini, who could turn his hand to anything – architecture, interior design, painting, garden design, even book illustration. The first half of the eighteenth century was a period when garden design in Britain was in a state of flux. Kent proved to have a crucial role in adapting an evolving naturalistic style to his own unique vision, and was praised by Horace Walpole in On Modern Gardening. According to Christopher Hussey, he provided exactly what the Early Georgians looked for in the new gardening: ‘elegant variation, evocation of an ideal past, and the visual embodiment of a philosophical idea.’ This talk looks at some of Kent’s best work including Rousham, Esher and Stowe and evaluates him in relation to his contemporaries, Charles Bridgeman, Stephen Switzer and Robert Castell.  

This lecture will be given by George Carter and Caroline Knight. George Carter is a garden historian and designer who specialises in restoring and recreating historic gardens, particularly of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. He has written several books on garden design and his work has appeared in numerous books and magazines. Caroline Knight is an architectural historian specialising in British Architecture of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. She is an independent lecturer at the V&A Museum and for the Arts Society and the author of London’s Country Houses. 

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

This lecture is part of our Georgian Gardens and Landscapes series. The full list of lectures in the series is as follows:

Tuesday 2 March – Hidden Horticulturists

Tuesday 9 March – Marble Hill – A Garden of Grottos and Groves

Tuesday 16 March – William Kent: Garden Designer, Architect, Interior Designer

Tuesday 23 March – Vauxhall, Sex & Entertainment: The Invention of the Urban Pleasure Garden

Tuesday 30 March – Welsh Gardens and the Grand Tour

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

£3 members/£5 non-members

This illustrated lecture will analyse the social dynamics of London’s most popular and celebrated Pleasure Garden in Vauxhall, which flourished between 1732 and its final closure in 1859. It pioneered the commercialisation of mass entertainment and the eroticisation of the leisure industry. In other words, it blended timeless human interests in sex and good company with the allure of celebrity culture plus the provision of a great range of leisure services in an organised and inclusive style. No wonder that countless similar urban Gardens across Britain, in Paris and, eventually, in cities around the world, were named after Vauxhall.

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.

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

This lecture is part of our Georgian Gardens and Landscapes series. The full list of lectures in the series is as follows:

Tuesday 2 March – Hidden Horticulturists

Tuesday 9 March – Marble Hill – A Garden of Grottos and Groves

Tuesday 16 March – William Kent: Garden Designer, Architect, Interior Designer

Tuesday 23 March – Vauxhall, Sex & Entertainment: The Invention of the Urban Pleasure Garden

Tuesday 30 March – Welsh Gardens and the Grand Tour

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

While working on her book, The Most Glorious Prospect: Garden Visiting in Wales 1639-1900(2017), Bettina Harden found that the experience of the Grand Tour to Italy ran as a leitmotif through the development of landscaped parks and gardens across Wales. Carrying on from the book, she has examined the links between the Grand Tour and its effect on the Welsh patrons and owners who, on their return from the Continent, set about bringing something of what they had seen abroad to their home surroundings. The result is a lecture exploring the intricacies of the Grand Tour, its demands and discoveries, its shopping and scholarship, focused on Welshmen who had travelled to Rome in the eighteenth century: Sirs Watkin Williams-Wynne, father and son, 3^rd and 4^thBaronets of Wynnstay; Thomas Mansel, 2^nd Lord Mansel, and Thomas and Christopher Mansel-Talbot of Margam; Thomas Bulkeley, 7^th Viscount Bulkeley of Baron Hill; Colonel John Campbell of Stackpole Court. The lecture aims to link these men, their Grand Tour, their purchases and Italian dreams of landscape beauty together to demonstrate how ‘gardening and refined connoisseurship were the obsession of the age.’

Bettina Harden is a lecturer and writer on historic gardens. She was formerly Chairman of the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust and was Founder Chairman of the Gateway Gardens Trust.

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: The Arrival of a Young Traveller and his Suite during the Carnival in Piazza de’Spagna, Rome, David Allan (c.1775). Here you can see the new arrival being besieged with goods for sale. The Café delle Inglesi and the Ville de Londres on either side of the Piazza were popular places for the young travellers to meet up. (Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2020))

This lecture is part of our Georgian Gardens and Landscapes series. The full list of lectures in the series is as follows:

Tuesday 2 March – Hidden Horticulturists

Tuesday 9 March – Marble Hill – A Garden of Grottos and Groves

Tuesday 16 March – William Kent: Garden Designer, Architect, Interior Designer

Tuesday 23 March – Vauxhall, Sex & Entertainment: The Invention of the Urban Pleasure Garden

Tuesday 30 March – Welsh Gardens and the Grand Tour

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

£3 members/£5 non-members

The eighteenth-century English Landscape Movement pioneered a radical new approach to sculpting and farming the land which gives great inspiration for the issues we face today. Landscape architect Kim Wilkie will trace this development through looking at some of the projects he has worked on, including the great landscapes of Boughton (for which he won a Georgian Group award in 2011 for Restoration of a Georgian Garden or Landscape) and Heveningham, as well as some more humble manor houses.

Kim Wilkie is a renowned landscape architect. After decades of running his own practice, Kim now works as a strategic and conceptual landscape consultant. He collaborates with architects and landscape architects around the world.

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

This lecture is part of our Georgian Gardens and Landscapes series. The full list of lectures in the series is as follows:

Tuesday 2 March – Hidden Horticulturists

Tuesday 9 March – Marble Hill – A Garden of Grottos and Groves

Tuesday 16 March – William Kent: Garden Designer, Architect, Interior Designer

Tuesday 23 March – Vauxhall, Sex & Entertainment: The Invention of the Urban Pleasure Garden

Tuesday 30 March – Welsh Gardens and the Grand Tour

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

£3 members/£5 non-members

Using many unpublished illustrations, historian Philip Mansel shows that Napoleon was not, as Hegel called him ‘the world soul on horseback’, but above all a monarch: Emperor of the French, King of Italy and Protector of the Confederation of the Rhine. He abolished republics in Venice, Genoa, Milan, Dubrovnik and the Netherlands, and made the rulers of Saxony, Bavaria and Wurttemberg kings. In France, he recreated a court, a dynasty and a nobility. His uniforms, palaces and furniture, usually designed by Percier and Fontaine, helped rebrand monarchy for the nineteenth century. On Elba and Saint Helena he maintained more etiquette than most other monarchs in exile. His principal internal reform, the Code Napoleon, was adopted in many foreign countries but none of his frontiers or constitutions survived. He left France smaller and weaker than he found it, having lost over 900,000 soldiers’ lives and all its conquests.

Philip Mansel is a historian of courts and cities, and of France and the Ottoman Empire. He co-founded the Society for Court Studies and has appeared on television and radio. He has published extensively, including some fourteen books, and has contributed to numerous newspapers and journals.

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