This talk is part of the Online Winter Lecture Series 2025 called Victorian and Edwardian Women in Architecture. Follow this link to book all of the lectures.
Organised by Lynne Walker
The spring lecture series provides the opportunity to engage with recent, path-breaking research by leading experts which gives a fresh perspective on women’s diverse roles in nineteenth and early twentieth century architecture as designers, patrons, clients, philanthropists, and businesswomen, as well as their emergence as professional architects by 1900. In the broad context of Victorian society, this series considers themes and issues which both facilitated and limited women’s agency and contribution in a male-dominated world, most notably, family, social and political networks, widowhood and wealth.
Victorian and Edwardian Women in Architecture: An Introduction
by Lynne Walker
Forty years after the first historical exhibition about the work of British women architects, the role and the richness of their participation and achievement remain largely unknown. Lynne Walker introduces a series of lectures that will extend our knowledge not only of women in architecture but the Victorian period and its architectural and social history.
Lynne Walker, a member of the Victorian Society since 1970, is an IHR Fellow at the Institute of Historical Research in London and an HonFRIBA. She has published widely on women in architecture and design and curated the foundational exhibitions ‘Women Architects: Their Work’ (1984) at the RIBA and ‘Drawing on Diversity: Women, Architecture and Practice’ (1997) in the RIBA Heinz Gallery. Most recently, she has contributed a review article on women in global architecture to Architectural History, 2023.
All attendees will be sent a recording of the talk.
Image: Watts Cemetery Chapel by Mary Watts, Photo by Antony McCallum, CC