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: 4
Women and the Re-making of Edinburgh’s Old Town in the late-Victorian and
Tuesday 17th November 2026, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
This talk explores the way that women of all classes sought to re-make the urban environment in Edinburgh’s Old Town between the 1880s and the 1910s. With a particular focus on the Canongate (and an excursion to Charlotte Square in the New Town), it will discuss the way women made interventions into existing buildings and spaces, which resulted in transformed environments that were intended to improve and enhance the lives of the Old Town community.
Elizabeth Darling is an independent architectural historian. Her publications include Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870–1950 (2007), co-edited with Lesley Whitworth, and Suffragette City, Women, Politics, and the Built Environment (2020; co-edited with Nathaniel Walker.
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: Early 20th-century view of the Canongate in Edinburgh’s Old Town, by kind permission of the Episcopal Church of Old St Paul’s, Edinburgh