Online Autumn Lecture Series 2026
New Bearings in Victorian Architecture
Our autumn lecture series celebrates the publication of the most ambitious overview of Victorian architecture in a generation.
In his new volume for the Oxford History of Art, Victorian Architecture, G.A. Bremner, Professor of Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh, has broken with the tradition of surveys based on building typologies or style. Instead, he has approached this protean subject in a series of thematic chapters that highlight the way architecture is key to understanding Victorian debates about such issues as technology, urbanism, modernity, government, empire, faith, domesticity and consumerism. A fundamental aspect of his analysis is its consistent emphasis on the global nature of Victorian architecture and its place in the greater Britain forged by the country’s colonial expansion.
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Online Autumn Lecture: 1
New Bearings in Victorian Architecture: Michael Hall Interviews Prof. Alex Bremner
Wednesday 21st October 2026, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
The series begins with Michael Hall interviewing Professor G.A. Bremner about the ideas that underpin his book and the ways that it represents new ways of thinking about Victorian buildings.
A regular lecturer to the Victorian Society, Professor Bremner is the author of Imperial Gothic: Religious Architecture and High Anglican Culture in the British Empire c.1840-70, published by Yale University Press in 2013, which received the Alice Davis Hitchcock Medallion for 2013 from the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain, and the William M. B. Berger Prize for British Art History in 2014, and Building Greater Britain: Architecture, Imperialism, and the Edwardian Baroque Revival, c.1885–1920, published by Yale in 2022. The interview will be a hybrid event in person at the Swedenborg Hall, London, as well as being online, and will offer the audience an opportunity to put questions to Professor Bremner and to discuss over a glass of wine the issues he has raised. This event will be followed by six online talks in which a number of distinguished scholars explore aspects of the themes he has highlighted.
Each lecture is recorded and sent out within a week after the talk. This recording can be accessed at any time.
The Victorian Society is an IHBC recognised CPD provider.
Image: Book cover for Victorian Architecture book