This talk is part of the Online Autumn Lecture Series 2025 called Hot Off The Press: Victorians in the Bookshops. Follow this link to book all of the lectures.
Our autumn lecture series celebrates the remarkable recent flourishing of publications on Victorian architecture and related topics. All the speakers are the authors of new books, either just published or forthcoming. Among them are two contributors to the highly successful series Victorian Architects, published by the Victorian Society in collaboration with Liverpool University Press. As well as discussions of individual architects, the subjects of the lectures range from interiors of the Aesthetic Movement to one of the greatest of all Victorian collectors.
E.W. Godwin by Aileen Reid
Although his fame today rests largely on his distinguished Aesthetic Movement furniture and friendships with Oscar Wilde and J.M. Whistler, throughout his life E.W. Godwin (1833–86) styled himself ‘architect’ above and before anything else. Although the legacy of his buildings is relatively small, his architectural design reached unmatched heights of creativity and distinctiveness, whether in his early years as a leading exponent of Ruskinian Gothic at Northampton Town Hall or in his radical approach to domestic design in his later artists’ studio houses in Chelsea.
Aileen Reid’s monograph on Godwin, the first to focus on his buildings, will be published in Liverpool University Press’s Victorian Architects series in collaboration with the Society in the spring of next year
All attendees will be sent a recording of the talk.
This event helps raise funds for The Victorian Society - the only charity dedicated to fighting for our Victorian and Edwardian heritage. Funds raised from events and memberships allow us to employ expert caseworkers to reply to thousands of planning applications a year in our role as a statutory consultee in the planning system.
We help tackle the climate emergency by campaigning for the sensitive reuse of historic buildings to generate much lower carbon emissions than demolition and rebuild. Join us today and safeguard our unique cultural heritage for future generations! For further information, click here.
Image: Ornaments and Architecture Book By Creator:Edward William Godwin - This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=60849823
