The Greats of 19th Century Architecture (7 talks for 6) (RECORDING)

Thank you for buying the package deal, we hope you enjoy the talks! With your ticket you receive a recording to watch whenever you like.

All proceeds go to supporting the Victorian Society and the fight to save the England and Wales' Victorian and Edwardian Heritage.

January 26th

An Architect Abroad: Mr Street en vacances

In memory of Geoff Brandwood, a former Chairman of the Victorian Society who died suddenly in November 2021, Professor Neil Jackson, Chair of the Events Committee, will present a lecture on the architect G E Street, on whom Geoff, at the time of his death, was preparing a monograph.

The original lecture, "Splendour in the North", has unfortunately been cancelled due to Geoff's passing.

An Architect Abroad: Mr Street en vacances: This talk will follow G E Street's travels in France, Italy and Spain and, with the help of his sketches and his books and articles, show what he admired about foreign architecture and how he incorporated it into his own work.

9 February

Prince Albert, architect? by Michael Hall

Many buildings are said to have been ‘designed’ by Prince Albert, from Osborne House and Whippingham church on the Isle of Wight to Balmoral Castle and the royal dairy at Frogmore. The lecture will ask how much input the Prince had into these buildings and their decoration and will discuss in particular a much less well-known building that is arguably his masterpiece.

Michael Hall is the author of a history of the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore, to be published by the Royal Collection in 2024.

22nd February

E.W. Pugin, by Roderick O’Donnell

The eighteen Edward Welby Pugin succeeded to the practice of his father, A.W.N. Pugin in 1852. In the course of a short working life – just twenty-three years – he established himself as one of the best-known architects working for Roman Catholic patrons. He designed houses, schools, convents and monasteries as well as churches and cathedrals of great originality. A manic work ethic, financial problems, frequent public controversy, much litigation and even accusations of mental instability brought him aged forty to an early grave.

A leading authority on Roman Catholic architecture in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, Roderick O’Donnell has published extensively on the work of E.W. Pugin and his father.

9th March

William Burges, by Matthew Williams

William ‘Billy’ Burges was short, fat, eccentric and bad-tempered. He was also a genius who created some of the most extraordinary buildings of the nineteenth century. Immersed in the world of the Middle Ages, he designed churches, castles, bridges, interiors, furniture, textiles, metalwork and jewellery for his few, equally individual clients.

Matthew Williams was for many years curator of one of Burges’s greatest creations, Cardiff Castle. His book Cardiff Castle and the Marquesses of Bute was published in 2019.

23 March

David Bryce, by Neil Jackson

Few nineteenth-century Edinburgh architects demonstrated such a plurality of style, from Scottish Baronial to French Château to Neo-classicism to Baroque, as did David Bryce. And he did Gothic too. His buildings provided security for the wealthy, succour for the poorly, knowledge for the young, reassurance for the pious and a sense of ancestry for the lairds.

Neil Jackson was educated in one of Bryce’s finest buildings and there discovered the joys of architecture. Now an architect, architectural historian and Professor Emeritus of Architecture he was, as a callow youth, fortunate enough to work on Alistair Rowan and Valerie Fiddes’s 1976 centennial exhibition, Mr David Bryce.

29th March

Philip Webb at Red House and Standen, by Tessa Wild

Two famous houses at opposite ends of Philip Webb’s career are now owned by the National Trust: Red House at Bexleyheath, designed for William and Jane Morris in 1858–59, and Standen, near East Grinstead in West Sussex, designed for a London solicitor, James S. Beale and his wife, Margaret, in 1891. Their history encompasses not only the development of one of England’s most influential domestic architects but also the story of the Arts and Crafts movement over a generation.

Tessa Wild was a curator for the National Trust for seventeen years, with responsibility for Red House from 2002 to 2016. Her book William Morris and his Palace of Art: Architecture, Interiors and Design at Red House was published in 2018. She is working on a book on Standen.

6th April

Looking at Butterfield, by Nicholas Olsberg

Focusing on the approach taken by the lecturer with the photographer James Morris in making photographs for the first monograph on William Butterfield since Paul Thompson’s pioneering book of 1971, the talk will concentrate on lesser-known but outstanding examples of his work, including the astonishing Yorkshire churches on the Humberhead Levels and at Dalton; the flinty ruggedness of Salisbury Theological Seminary; the sturdy pragmatic grandeur of Exeter Grammar School and its chapel; the invention of an entire townscape at Gordon Boys’ Home in Bagshot; some of Butterfield’s vast and largely unrecorded corpus of lodges and cottages; and ending with the memorial chapel, great house, library and garden at Ottery St Mary, a late, meditative world of dream and memory.

A former director of the Canadian Centre for Architecture and founding head of Special Collections at the Getty Research Institute, Nicholas Olsberg is the author of The Master Builder: William Butterfield and his Times, published by Lund Humphries in 2021.