Online Spring Lecture Series 2026
Heroines and Heroes of the Arts and Crafts Movement
THESE TICKETS ARE FOR ONLINE ONLY. FOR THOSE WHO WANT TO ATTEND IN PERSON, PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK.
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.
TO BOOK THE COMPLETE SERIES, PLEASE FOLLOW THIS LINK.
NEW STARTING TIME: 6:30pm
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. Each lecture costs:
£6 for members/ £8 for non-members / £3 for Young Victorians
Spring Lecture Series: 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.
The Victorian Society is an IHBC recognised CPD provider.
Image: The Room de Luxe at The Willow Tearooms, Glasgow designed by Charles Rennie Mackintosh in collaboration with Margaret MacDonald for Catherine Cranston. Photograph by User:Dave souza.