Spring Lecture Series 2026
Heroines and Heroes of the Arts and Crafts Movement
As a result of the pandemic, the Victorian Society’s two annual lecture series have since autumn 2020 taken place online, where they have drawn very large audiences. With the spring 2026 series, organised by Steven Brindle, Maya Donelan and Michael Hall, we are moving to a hybrid arrangement of in-person lectures that will be live-streamed as well as being available as recordings. The subject is one of perennial interest, the Arts and Crafts movement. Although it might be thought that there is little more to be learned about its leading practitioners, our speakers will be drawing on a large amount of new research, much of which is highlighting the often-neglected role played by women in a movement that remains of direct relevance to architects, artists and designers today.
THESE TICKETS ARE FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO ATTEND IN PERSON. FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO ATTEND ONLINE ONLY, PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK.
Lectures will be about an hour long and take place at
NYU London, 265 Strand, London WC2R 1BH.
Doors open at 6:15 pm and the lecture starts at 6:30 pm. Refreshments will be available after the lecture (not included in the ticket prices).
Tube: Charing Cross, Waterloo or Temple.
Each lecture is recorded and sent out within a week after the talk. This recording can be accessed at any time.
There is new pricing in place. The complete in-person series of 7 lectures for 6:
£66 for members/ £90 for non-members / £33 for Young Victorians
Spring Lecture: 1
Philip Webb by Max Donnelly
Wednesday 28 January, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
If asked to name the most significant architect of the Arts and Crafts movement, most people would choose Philip Webb (1831-1915), yet despite the fame of his highly influential houses, the full extent of his achievements in the decorative arts has been overshadowed by his close personal and professional relationship with William Morris. Max Donnelly, Curator of Furniture and Woodwork 1800–1915 at the Victoria and Albert Museum, will discuss Webb’s works as a designer of domestic interiors, drawing on the wealth of new biographical information about the architect in his collected letters, published by John Aplin in 2016, and on the research he has carried out for a chapter on Webb’s designs for interior decoration in the catalogue for an exhibition on Webb to be held at the Bard Graduate Center, New York, and the V&A.
Spring Lecture: 2
Gertrude Jekyll: ‘Artist Gardener Craftswoman’ by Caroline Ikin
Wednesday 4 February, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
As the home of celebrated gardener Gertrude Jekyll (1843-1932), Munstead Wood holds deep significance as the place where her ideal of the ‘artist-gardener’ achieved complete expression. A trained artist, Jekyll also applied her creativity to the decorative arts, design and collecting, and was a skilled craftswoman. Recent research on the interiors and furnishing of Munstead Wood, now in the care of the National Trust, offers insight into the collaboration between Jekyll and her architect Edwin Lutyens to create a domestic space shaped around arts and crafts ideals.
Dr Caroline Ikin is National Trust Curator at Munstead Wood. She has previously worked in museums and for the Gardens Trust and her research interest lies broadly in nineteenth century art, architecture and gardens.
Spring Lecture: 3
From Surrey to New Delhi: Lutyens and the Arts & Crafts Movement by Clive Aslet
Wednesday 11 February, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
Growing up in the Surrey village of Thursley, Sir Edwin Lutyens didn’t know it, but he was to follow in the footsteps of greats like John Ruskin, William Morris and Philip Webb in the tradition of British pride in craftsmanship that was to define the Arts and Crafts movement at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Home educated and sickly, a chance meeting with the cottage-loaf shaped figure of Gertrude Jekyll would turn this young architect into THE architect of the rich elite of Surrey, London and beyond. Their partnership and his talent for charming his clients would see Lutyens move in ever greater circles and culminated in large scale projects of New Delhi and Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral – outwardly classical, elements of these monoliths can be traced back to designs found at Folly Farm, Marsh Court and Castle Drogo.
Clive Aslet is an award-winning writer and Visiting Professor of Architecture at the University of Cambridge. In 2019, he founded Triglyph Books with the photographer Dylan Thomas. Clive has published more than thirty books on architecture and British culture, beginning with The Last Country Houses for Yale University Press in 1982. His most recent publications include Sir Edwin Lutyens: Britain’s Greatest Architect? (2024) and King Charles III: 40 Years of Architecture (2025). For many years Clive was Editor of the magazine Country Life. He is now on the board of the INTBAU, and was awarded the ‘Board of Directors Honor’ at the 2025 Arthur Ross Awards for Excellence in Classical Tradition for his contribution to the field of Classical architecture in literature. Married with three children, Clive lives in London and Ramsgate, England.
Wednesday 18 February: No Lecture
Spring Lecture: 4
Phoebe Anna Traquair by Elizabeth Cumming
Wednesday 25 February, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
‘A woman the size of a fly’: Louis Davis’s 1902 comment to his friend Robert Lorimer gives no idea of the sheer ambition and many achievements of Phoebe Anna Traquair (1852–1936). Born and educated in Ireland, she settled with her Scottish husband to Edinburgh, where she became involved in the city’s social art movement, painting murals in tiny and vast buildings and teaching design from the 1880s. In addition, she produced some of Britain’s most remarkable embroideries, illuminated manuscripts, tooled bookcovers and art enamels, packed with colour and imagination. Our speaker, Dr Elizabeth Cumming, has documented Traquair’s life and art for nearly half a century, including most recently Phoebe Anna Traquair for the National Galleries of Scotland in 2022.
Spring Lecture: 5
Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald by Robyne Calvert
Wednesday 4 March, , 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
For all his fame – or perhaps partly because of it – more myths cling to Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868–1928) and his significance as a designer than to almost any other architect of the Arts and Crafts movement. Many centre on his marriage in 1900 to the artist Margaret Macdonald (1864–1933), with whom he was then collaborating on the design of the Ladies Luncheon Room at Miss Cranston’s Tearooms at Ingram Street, Glasgow. ‘You are half if not three-quarters in all my architectural work’, wrote Mackintosh to his wife, but how true was that? Their partnership will be analysed by Robyne Calvert, a cultural historian specializing in the art, architecture, design, and fashion of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Mackintosh Research Fellow at Glasgow School of Art from 2015 to 2021, she is the author of The Mack: Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the Glasgow School of Art, published by Yale University Press in 2024.
Spring Lecture: 6
May Morris and the Art of Embroidery by Lynn Hulse
Wednesday 11 March, 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
May Morris described design as ‘the very soul and essence of beautiful embroidery’ and ranked it chief among the four elements that make a piece of needlework truly ‘artistic’. Drawing on her substantial corpus of designs in the Ashmolean Museum, Lynn Hulse will explore May’s approach to translating a sketched idea into a finished piece of embroidery, contextualising her work within the artistic developments of needle-art that were taking place in the years leading up to and during her lifetime.
Dr Lynn Hulse is a textile scholar and practitioner, specialising in embroidered furnishings of the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements. She is the author of several publications on decorative needlework and editor of May Morris: Art & Life (2017). Her most recent book May Morris Designs was published by the Ashmolean Museum in August 2025. Formerly archivist at the Royal School of Needlework, Lynn now runs Ornamental Embroidery which delivers workshops, lectures and first-hand study sessions of objects in public and private collections.
Spring Lecture: 7
Christopher Whall by Peter Cormack
Wednesday 18 March, , 6:30 pm – 8:00 pm
When windows designed by Christopher Whall (1849–1924) were shown at the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society in London in 1888 they were immediately recognised as a break-through. Whall changed for ever the direction of the finest stained-glass in Britain and beyond, thanks to his mastery of not only design but also every stage of its manufacture – cutting, painting and glazing – to create windows in which sumptuous colours were combined with thickly textured ‘slab’ glasses and bold leading patterns. Whall’s achievement will be discussed by Peter Cormack, a noted scholar of post-medieval British and American stained glass, William Morris and the Arts and Crafts Movement, whose classic study Arts & Crafts Stained Glass, published by Yale University Press in 2015 was the first book to do Whall and his legacy full justice.
The Victorian Society is an IHBC recognised CPD provider.
Image: Stained Glass ‘Risen Christ’ by Christopher Whall, From Parish Church of All Saints Ashmont, Photos By NateBergin – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=164417342