Events
Victorian Society events are publicised to members below and in the 'Blue Sheet' with our mailings in February, June and October. Some require booking, others you can just turn up on the day.
For events organised by our regional groups, please see the regional group pages:
Birmingham & West Midlands; Leicester; Liverpool; Manchester; South Yorkshire and Wales.
We're always looking for volunteers to put on events for us. Please contact our Events Administrator for more information.
1924.7 Lecture: Josiah Conder and Meiji Japan
Wednesday 20 November 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
The British architect, Josiah Conder, is still considered to be ‘the father of Japanese modern architecture’ and his statue can be seen on the University of Tokyo campus. In the final lecture of the series, Neil Jackson will examine the role played by Conder in the introduction of Western architecture and of architectural education to Meiji Japan. At the Art Workers'...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available1927 Pub Crawl: St John's Wood to Maida Vale
Monday 25 November 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Geoff Brandwood reprises a classic pub crawl taking in three of London’s most glorious pubs fitted out at the end of the nineteenth century. At them all we can clearly see how pubs a century or so ago were planned and organised very differently from today. We begin at Crocker’s Folly in St John’s Wood with its opulent wood and...
Price for single attendee: £12.00
Sold out1928 High Society Decorating: Cowtan & Sons Wallpaper Books
Tuesday 26 November 2:30 PM to 3:30 PM
Led by Dr Wendy Andrews. Cowtan & Sons were a leading 19th-century decorating firm whose clients included many of the wealthier and more fashionable members of aristocratic society. The Victoria & Albert Museum owns 24 of the company’s customer order books dating from 1824 to 1938 which include thousands of original samples of hand- and machine-printed wallpapers along with the...
Price for single attendee: £15.00
Sold out2000.1 Lecture: Restoring the Future
Wednesday 15 January 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Tom Emerson co-founded 6a Architects with Stephanie Macdonald in 2001. They are particularly known for their gallery projects which include the South London Gallery (adapting the Peckham Road Fire Station), the Raven Row Gallery in Spitalfields and the recent extension to the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. No less important (though well beyond the Victorian Society remit) has been their...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available2000.2 Lecture: Perpetual Change
Monday 20 January 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Biba Dow of Dow Jones Architects has a particular reputation for her work in the renewal and reuse of London churches. Her extension to Street’s St Mary Magdalene Paddington, recently completed, is the project best known to the Victorian Society. Also there is the superb renewal of the crypt at Christ Church Spitalfields and the remodelling plus extension of St...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available2001 An 1890s House in Clapham
Thursday 23 January 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Although tens of thousands of middle-class terraced houses were built in London at the end of the 19th century, very few have retained their character and fittings through changes in fashion and the ravages of time. This is a rare chance to see the colourful and atmospheric interiors of such an 1890s house in Clapham, along with the collection of...
Price for single attendee: £17.00
Sold out2000.3 Lecture: The Uses of History: Dialogue of Forms
Wednesday 29 January 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Alison Brooks, principal and creative director of Alison Brooks Architects will discuss the role of archetype as a critical physical and conceptual framework for human experience, and how she transforms these models into an experimental, culturally specific architecture. She will discuss her seminal new Quadrangle for Exeter College, Oxford; a competition-winning scheme for York Castle Museum; a new Maggie’s Centre...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available2002 Visit to Drapers’ Hall
Friday 31 January 10:30 AM to 12:45 PM
The 1890s front is free commercial Northern Renaissance. Red brick and stone above. Polished granite shop fronts below. The Drapers’ presence is signalled by Jackson’s entrance. We will be given a tour of this amazingly untouched building, looking at its dramatic interior which includes the unusually deep basement, reached by a circular stairwell. Its gold mosaic decoration of 1900 is...
Price for single attendee: £15.00
Sold out2000.4 Lecture: Transformations: A Dialogue between Old and New
Tuesday 04 February 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Burd Haward (Catherine Burd and Buddy Haward) came to attention for their Forge performance venue in Camden (2009) and for their new Welcome Buildings for the National Trust at Mottisfont (2016). New infill housing, also in Camden (2018), demanded a careful response to a different kind of context. They are now engaged on significant projects at two high-profile historic sites,...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available2003 Visit to Victoria & Albert Museum
Friday 07 February 2:00 PM to 3:15 PM
Max Donnelly, Curator of Nineteenth-Century Furniture, will present a gallery talk in the British Galleries, selecting furniture and other objects. He will focus on the interiors for which they were designed, including William Beckford’s Lansdown Tower in Bath, William Burges’s Cardiff Castle and Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s Glasgow tea rooms. Meet by the Reception Desk in the Main (Cromwell Road) Entrance,...
Price for single attendee: £12.00
Sold out2000.5 Lecture: Architecture and Continuity
Tuesday 11 February 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Eric Parry ranks amongst the best-known architects working today, noted for his fresh approach to commercial architecture (Eagle Place, Piccadilly and Fen Court in the City) and his institutional buildings (The Triangle, for the Cambridge exam board). But his willingness to work creatively in sensitive places is often to the forefront, as it was when his practice completed the renewal...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available2000.6 Lecture: When we Build, Let us Think that we Build Forever
Wednesday 19 February 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Clare and Sandy Wright founded their practice in 1994. Although they have done many other kinds of projects, such as the Hull Truck Theatre, they are best known for their work in relation to historic buildings. Libraries have been to the fore, for colleges in Oxford and Cambridge, and now for the new build Archive of the Church of England...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available2004 Visit to Wartski
Thursday 20 February 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM
Wartski, a family-owned firm specialising in Carl Fabergé, fine jewellery and antique goldsmiths’ work, was founded in Bangor, North Wales in 1865 by Morris Wartski, maternal great-grandfather of the present-day Chairman. The London branch was opened by Emanuel Snowman, the son-in-law of Morris Wartski, in 1911. During the 1920s Emanuel Snowman was amongst the first to negotiate with the government...
Price for single attendee: £20.00
Sold out2000.7 Lecture: Architecture in the Historic Present
Monday 24 February 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Adam Caruso co-founded Caruso St John in 1990, a practice known for its thoughtful work on historic buildings as well as the design of new buildings across Europe. Their Newport Street Gallery, designed for Damien Hirst’s collections, won the RIBA Stirling Prize in 2016, and their masterplan and re-structuring of Tate Britain has transformed visitors’ experience of the building. Adam...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available2005 Visit to 14-16 Hans Road, Knightsbridge
Wednesday 04 March 5:00 PM to 6:00 PM
In 1893, The Studio magazine, in ‘An Interview with Mr Charles F Annesley Voysey, architect and designer’, opined that the two houses on Hans Road ‘do not amaze you by sheer novelty as Mr Britten’s studio [at 17 St Dunstan’s Road, Hammersmith] surprises.’ Here is an opportunity to judge for yourself. The two houses are now conjoined and, although being...
Price for single attendee: £15.00
Sold out2006 Dinner at The Athenaeum, Pall Mall
Friday 06 March 7:00 PM to 10:00 PM
Following the highly popular dinner held at the Athenaeum in 2017, the Victorian Society is returning there again in 2020. Here, in Decimus Burton’s magnificent Greek Revival building of 1827-30, guests may enjoy a drink in the drawing room followed by three-course dinner, with wine and coffee, in the North Library. The Athenaeum holds prime position on the corner of...
Price for single attendee: £105.00
Booking available2007 Visits to Greek Cathedral and St Matthew’s Church, Bayswater
Saturday 14 March 2:00 PM to 3:30 PM
A guided visit to the Greek Orthodox Cathedral, Moscow Road, 1877-9 by John Oldrid Scott. An outstanding essay in Byzantine architecture designed by JO Scott for the Greek community in London, with woodwork by Farmer & Brindley, mosaics by AG Walker, Cappello and Mercenero and Boris Andrerp, paintings by Ludwig Thiersch combining to create a sumptuous interior. The visit is...
Price for single attendee: £15.00
Sold out2008 Cycle Tour of Ealing
Saturday 21 March 10:00 AM to 1:00 PM
Join us for a gentle meander through the streets of Ealing looking at 19th- and 20th-century houses and public buildings including the Brentham Estate, the first garden suburb, which predates Hampstead, as well as Ealing Abbey, St Peter’s church in Montpellier Road and down to St Mary’s in South Ealing. The tour is led by Elain Harwood, architectural historian with...
Price for single attendee: £10.00
Booking available2009 Pub Crawl: Hampstead to Belsize Park
Monday 30 March 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Geoff Brandwood leads a crawl (and one bus journey) to three classic pubs which still retain much of their Victorian interiors and which say much about how pubs were planned and fitted out a century or more ago. The simplicity of the Holly Bush, Hampstead, contrasts with the opulence of the Wasghington in Belsize Park while the famous Flask in...
Price for single attendee: £12.00
Booking available2010 Lutyens walk through the West End from Trafalgar Square to St Paul’s looking at the little-known City of London work
Thursday 02 April 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Led by Paul Waite. Although the buildings of Reuters and Country Life may be well known as being by Sir Edwin Lutyens, he also designed a building for “The Garden” magazine in Kingsway for William Robinson and the offices for Farrer & Co in Lincolns Inn Fields – the latter being his only client where he designed the town house,...
Price for single attendee: £14.00
Booking available2099 Study Day: French Architecture and the English, 1835–1914
Saturday 25 April 9:55 AM to 5:30 PM
French Architecture and the English, 1835–1914
A study day at the Art Workers' Guild, 6 Queen Square, London WC1N 3AT. Saturday 25 April 2020 9.55am to 5.30pm. Doors open at 9.30am.
The aim of this study day is threefold: to examine the various Victorian buildings built in England to the designs of French architects and explain...
Price for single attendee: £55.00
Booking available