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: 6
The Crimea Memorial Church in Constantinople, from Competition to Completion, by Neil Jackson
Tuesday 1st December, 2026, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
The building of the Crimea Memorial Church in Constantinople, from the design competition of 1856 to the building’s completion in 1868, is one of the more tragic stories of Victorian architecture: how William Burges’s brilliant design was whittled away, its architect sacked, and how George Edmund Street was called in to replace him. Using documentary evidence from the Bodleian Library and the RIBA Drawings Collection, this lecture follows the course of the design’s retrogression from a large, richly ornate vision to something little more than an English parish church on a cramped site in the city’s Pera district.
Neil Jackson is Emeritus Professor of Architecture, University of Liverpool. In 2027 he will publish Josiah Conder: The Father of Modern Japanese Architecture (with Robert Morton). Conder worked for Burges.
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: William Burges’s entry for the Crimeas Memorial Church competition, 1857. © RIBA Drawings Collection, RIBA