Events

£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.

***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 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

James Gillray produced the best jokes in Georgian Britain. Working from the heart of Piccadilly, Gillray, Rowlandson, Cruikshank and a host of others used surrealist imagery, dark humour and biting wit to produce a quality of work yet to be surpassed. They mocked political squabbles with scatological humour and burlesqued the haut monde with a striking capacity for vendetta. Whilst Gillray is most famous for political works such as The Plumb-pudding in danger, he also produced a vast amount of social satires. This talk will look at one of Gillray’s most effective satirical tools: music. How did the audible translate to the visual? Who would have seen these jokes? What do they mean? Why were they so funny?

Alice Loxton is a History Presenter for History Hit TV, where she has presented and produced many documentaries including The Battle of Edgehill, Broadway Tower, The Rollright Stones and The Eleanor Crosses. Her interest in historical satire spans far and wide. Whilst she is currently writing a book on James Gillray and the Golden Age of British Satire, she also founded the award winning satirical history magazine The Plague, and produced and performed News@1066, a satirical history show at the Edinburgh Fringe.

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

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 6 April – Follies: An Architectural Journey

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 6 April – Follies: An Architectural Journey

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

£3 members, £5 non-members

James Gibbs’s Church of St Mary-le-Strand has often been interpreted by historians as Gibbs’s most Italianate building, the expression, in stylistic terms, of his Tory politics and his Roman Catholic faith. As such, many have viewed it as a failure, one that identified Gibbs as being out of step with the Palladianism that was coming into fashion as the church went up. In this talk, William Aslet argues that this view has been misconceived. Rather than taking its cues from Baroque Italy, Aslet will suggest that in this church Gibbs responds quite precisely to its unique London island site. Rather than a failure, St Mary-le-Strand emerges as the building that made Gibbs’s name and launched his career.

William Aslet is currently researching for a PhD on James Gibbs at Peterhouse, University of Cambridge. He read History at the University of Oxford, before moving to Cambridge, where he completed his MPhil, also on Gibbs. His publications include works on eighteenth-century British architecture as well as on Elizabethan portrait miniatures.

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

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 6 April – Follies: An Architectural Journey

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 6 April – Follies: An Architectural Journey

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 6 April – Follies: An Architectural Journey

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

£3 members/£5 non-members

Follies were an important feature of English landscape gardens in the long eighteenth century. They could take a multitude of forms, from lavish banqueting houses to temples to lost loves, while their designers read like a ‘Who’s Who’ of the greatest figures in Georgian architecture and landscape design – Wren, Vanbrugh, Kent, ‘Capability’ Brown and Repton. In this talk, Rory Fraser will take us on an illustrated journey across England as he unearths the stories behind these often-overlooked architectural gems. Fraser’s philosophy is that follies, though often marginalised, serve as focal points for architecture, landscape and literature. As such, they create a series of portals through which to understand the periods in which they were built, providing an alternative lens through which to track and celebrate the English character, culture and love of individualism.

Rory Fraser was brought up between Rutland and Inverness. He worked for English Heritage and learnt Art History in Venice and Florence, before studying English at Oxford University where he specialised in landscape poetry and architecture, and wrote comedy for the Oxford Review. On graduating, he worked for John Simpson Architects in Bloomsbury. He is currently at Cambridge University, where he is doing an MPhil in Architectural History under Frank Salmon. His book, Follies: An Architectural Journey, was published in November 2020.

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: Sezincote, Rory Fraser)

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 6 April – Follies: An Architectural Journey

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 6 April – Follies: An Architectural Journey

Tuesday 13 April – The English Landscape Revolution

£3 members, £5 non-members

Mark Girouard, in his iconic Life in the English Country House, playfully noted that by the late eighteenth century, nature had come to be considered ‘refreshing’ rather than ‘frightening’ and, as a consequence, ‘one can watch country houses gradually sinking into the ground and opening up to the surrounding landscape’. Consistent with increasingly popular notions of the Picturesque, this general trend toward lowering the principal floor from piano nobile to ground level, coupled with a growing fashion for full-length windows, resulted in a closer engagement between house and garden. The increase in the size and number of windows fostered a greater openness to light, air and views; in addition, one could often walk directly through these multiple ground-level openings between interior and exterior. This talk will address different forms of permeability, looking at the adoption of various types of windows as well as the growing popularity of attached conservatories and other transitional spaces, such as loggias and verandas. Focusing on the work of James Wyatt (1746–1813), John Nash (1752–1835) and Sir John Soane (1753–1837), it will probe Girouard’s broad overview of the period in more specific detail, assessing how and to what extent leading architects of the day were indeed seeking to blur the boundaries between interior and exterior, with each architect’s distinctive approaches to permeability affecting the experience of moving within and between the house and its surroundings in novel but enduring ways.

Rebecca Tropp is currently finishing her PhD in History of Art at St John’s College, University of Cambridge, working under the supervision of Dr Frank Salmon. She completed her MPhil in History of Art and Architecture at Cambridge in 2015, investigating recurring spatial arrangements and patterns of movement in the country houses of John Nash. Prior to commencing postgraduate studies in the UK, she received her bachelor’s degree from Columbia University in New York, where she majored in the History and Theory of Architecture.

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 note that due to copyright restrictions this talk will NOT be recorded

Please read our Terms and Conditions before booking

£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. His latest book is a life of Louis XIV, the king who was one of Napoleon’s models: King of the World (Penguin 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

To coincide with the bicentenary of Napoleon’s death, this lecture will review Sir John Soane’s interest in Napoleon Bonaparte. A select but significant collection of Napoleonica at Sir John Soane’s Museum is described within a dedicated portion of Soane’s 1832 guidebook, Description of the House and Museum... The most notable examples can be seen in Soane’s Breakfast Room, where a density of such items forms a shrine of sorts. And Soane collected an array of other items related to Napoleon, including commemorative bronze medals, and up to fifty books. But what can explain Soane’s interest in Napoleon? At first sight it appears so heavily at odds with his position as an architect to the English establishment. Soane had worked for the majority of William Pitt’s political circle and was Architect to the Bank of England and the Palace of Westminster. Napoleon may have been painted by the British press as the bogeyman of Europe, but Soane was capable of greater subtlety. As a self-made man, Soane appreciated Napoleon’s rise from a lowly Lieutenant to a mighty Emperor. Furthermore, he admired Napoleon’s efforts to improve the architectural and cultural fabric of Paris, which he visited as soon as peace allowed in 1814. To Soane, the Musée Napoleon (now known as the Louvre) highlighted the paucity of public collections in Britain. There is an argument to be made that the horror vacui within the Louvre formed an inspiration to Soane’s collection, far more than any extant British institution. Moreover, we must consider Napoleon’s improvements in Parisian town planning, particularly the axis connecting the Place de la Concorde, along the Champs Élysée to the Arc de Triomphe. By comparison, London was a piecemeal jumble. Soane did not particularly imitate the minutiae of Republican French neo-classical architecture, but he did emulate Napoleon’s Parisian cityscape, when in 1827-28 he proposed a grand processional route through London. This would have connected Windsor Castle and Westminster Palace, via a new Royal palace and two triumphal arches, and was intended to provide a processional route for the Monarch’s annual opening of Parliament. Although Soane’s scheme never came to fruition, it would have transformed a large swath of the capital into an urban paradise to rival Napoleon’s Paris. 

Frances Sands, Curator of Drawings and Books, Sir John Soane’s Museum, London. Fran research interests lie in Georgian architectural drawings. Prior to working at the Soane Museum she studied for a PhD at the University of York. Her thesis comprised a monographic study of Nostell Priory near Wakefield. In 2010 she was appointed Catalogue Editor at the Soane Museum, tasked with cataloguing the office drawings collection of Robert and James Adam – a vast project which is still ongoing. In 2016, she was appointed as the Curator of Drawings and Books, taking additional responsibility for the Soane Museum’s wider collection of 30,000 drawings and 7,000 books, as well as supervising the Soane Museum research library and drawings cataloguing projects. Since 2010, Fran has also served as a Trustee for the York Georgian Society, the Mausolea and Monuments Trust and the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain. 

The talks starts at 6.30pm. Joining details will be sent to attendees the morning of the talk.

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

At the beginning of the eighteenth century, Newstead Abbey was among the most admired aristocratic homes in England. It was home to William, 4th Baron Byron – a popular amateur composer and artist – and his teenage wife Frances. But just a few decades later, in the hands of their eldest son William, 5th Baron Byron – known as the ‘Wicked Lord’ – it had become a crumbling ruin. At William’s lonely death in 1798, reportedly mourned only by a swarm of insects, the Abbey fell to his great-nephew: a small, pudgy boy of ten from Aberdeen, who the world would come to know as the notorious 6th Lord Byron.

A dramatic and scandal-filled family saga unfolding over three generations, The Fall of the House of Byron reveals how the stage was set for the rise of the nation’s most revered (and on occasion reviled) Romantic poet. Following the lives of three siblings – a flirtatious countess desperately seeking true love, a villainous lord maligned as a murderer, and a navy hero with the century’s most harrowing survival story (the poet’s grandfather) – it offers an exciting and sweeping history of eighteenth-century Britain, through the eyes of a once notorious family who are now shrouded in legend or almost entirely forgotten. Introducing this remarkable dynasty, Emily Brand explores their adventures from Newstead Abbey to the haunted shores of Chile, and how they coloured the life of their most illustrious descendant. 

Emily Brand is an author, historian and genealogist specialising in social history and romantic relationships during the long eighteenth century. The Fall of the House of Byron was selected for BBC Radio 4’s Book of the Week, the Sunday Times’s ‘Best Summer Reads’ 2020, and was shortlisted for the Elma Dangerfield Prize. 

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 explore the fascinating life and scandalous death of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, celebrated in her day as the ‘female Byron’ for her poetry. The mysterious circumstances of her death, found with a bottle of Prussic acid in her hand at Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, in 1838, were as enigmatic as the particulars of her life; she was a woman with many secrets, not least three illegitimate children. Following her death she became the subject of a cover up which is only now unravelling and this talk will delve into the mystery of her life, work and death, set against the backdrop of the late Georgian period, that post-Byronic era which marked a ‘strange pause’ between the Romantics and the Victorians.

Lucasta Miller is a writer and literary journalist, who formerly worked as deputy literary editor of The Independent. She has contributed to The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and The Economist, as well as publishing and writing on the works of the Bronte sisters. Her biography of Letitia Elizabeth Landon 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

Brighton was a declining seaside town which regenerated as a seaside resort. Four more declining coastal towns also benefited from seaside tourism but Brighton outgrew them and has remained the most important resort of this quintet. We will explore why Brighton was fashionable before the arrival of George, Prince of Wales (whose influence on the resort has been overstated) and then examine the very significant impact of being on the front line during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1792-1815). From 1815 Brighton was transformed to such an extent that a visitor who knew it in 1780 would have found much of the townscape unfamiliar. We will look at how this happened.

The talk will be illustrated with some of the rich collection of images of it during this period, a collection that is currently undervalued as a resource for the marketing of the resort’s important surviving buildings to the many people interested in towns with an historic ambience as is clear from the popularity of Bath, Edinburgh and York as well as Lewes, the small town near Brighton.

Sue Berry is a historian who has published many articles on Brighton and Sussex in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. A number of her articles have appeared in the Georgian Group Journal. She published Georgian Brighton in 2005 and has also published about the resort’s history in the Sussex Archaeological Collections. Those articles published in the Collections will soon be accessible via the website sussexpast.co.uk/research/library. Sue is happy to email digital copies of those in the Collections to enquirers.

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***

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