Events
Victorian Society events are first publicised to members in the 'Blue Sheet' with our mailings in February, June and October before appearing below. Some require booking, others you can just turn up on the day. A ballot is held for oversubscribed events with first preference for members.
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.
1907 A Walk around the Angel
Saturday 06 April 2:00 PM to 4:00 PM
This walk led by Alec Forshaw will look at some of the fine Victorian and Edwardian buildings that help to give such a distinctive character to the centre and old village core of Islington. Starting and finishing at the Angel it will include the former Royal Agricultural Hall, the central Post Office and other commercial buildings, Barry’s Holy Trinity Church...
Price for single delegate: £15.00
Booking available1908 Audley End House and the Fry Art Gallery, Saffron Walden
Wednesday 01 May 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM
The morning will include a guided tour of the house interiors with house guides and a visit to the Print Room with the curator. Buy your own lunch at the house. Reconvene (transport to be decided) at the Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden for a visit to study engravings, linocuts, etc. of the North West Essex artists with the...
Price for single delegate: £50.00
Booking available1909 Hampstead Walk
Saturday 04 May 2:00 PM to Saturday 11 May 5:00 PM
With its clean air and magnificent views, hilltop Hampstead grew enormously in the nineteenth century, and was particularly popular with Victorian architects. This long and hilly walk led by Fabian Watkinson will include houses built for themselves by Basil Champneys, Reginald Blomfield, Ewan Christian and Norman Shaw, as well as imposing hospitals, schools, and churches by Teulon and Waterhouse. Meet...
Price for single delegate: £30.00
Booking available1910 Visit to the South London Gallery and Fire Station Peckham/Camberwell
Wednesday 15 May 7:00 PM to 8:30 PM
Tom Emerson of 6a Architects will be leading a tour of both buildings and talking about 6a’s approach to working with historic buildings. 6a Architects is best known for its contemporary art galleries, educational buildings, artists’ studios and residential projects, often in sensitive historic environments. Their 2010 works to the South London Gallery (formerly part of Camberwell College of Art, 1896-8,...
Price for single delegate: £18.00
Booking available1997 Study day: Great Gardens of Death: Urban cemeteries of the nineteenth century in England
Saturday 18 May 9:55 AM to 5:30 PM
A study day organised by The Victorian Society to coincide with National Cemeteries Week 2019, organised by the National Federation of Cemetery Friends, www.cemeteryfriends.com at the Art Workers’ Guild, London
Doors open at 9.30am
Garden cemeteries: the landscape of British cemeteries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
Brent Elliott
The public cemetery was a form of landscape that had no precedent...
Price for single delegate: £55.00
Booking available1911 St Mary Magdalene, Paddington: Victorian glory and 21st-century renewal
Monday 20 May 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
One of the greatest and most unusual churches of Victorian England, St Mary Magdalen’s was built in 1867–73 to designs by GE Street as a beacon of Anglo-Catholic faith in an area of great poverty. Apart from its striking architecture, it has carving by Earp, glass by Holiday and Heaton, Butler & Bayne, and, above all, magnificent ceiling decoration by...
Price for single delegate: £18.00
Sold out1912 Westminster walk to view work of Sir Edwin Lutyens
Thursday 23 May 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Led by Paul Waite. From Westminster beyond Smith Square to Trafalgar Square, this evening walk will look externally at the wide variety of work undertaken there by Sir Edwin. We shall see renovations of eighteenth-century houses and three very important new-build houses. We shall also see St John’s Institute, which was designed by Lutyens as a parish hall for St...
Price for single delegate: £15.00
Sold out1913 Pre-Raphaelites, Aesthetes, Impressionists and Chelsea’s Riverside: a guided tour of Chelsea Embankment artists’ houses and studios
Thursday 30 May 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Led by Joanna Banham. Until the 1870s, Chelsea’s riverside was modest, down-at-heel and malodorous, bookended by the infamous Cremorne Gardens at one end and the even more notorious Millbank Prison at the other. But while the area was shunned by respectable society, its appeal for artists was considerable. Many were drawn to the effects of light on water, and the...
Price for single delegate: £15.00
Sold out1999 Around Newport in 2½ days
Saturday 08 June 1:45 PM to Monday 10 June 5:15 PM
Organised by Elaine Davey and Geoff Brandwood. Explore the history and buildings of this South Wales city and its surrounding area on a tour organised and led by Elaine Davey and Geoff Brandwood.
Newport and its hinterland has a long history from prehistoric settlement, through the Romans with their first major fort at Caerleon, the castle-building Normans, and as a...
Price for single delegate: £317.00
Booking available1914 Victorian Lynn – a Walk
Saturday 15 June 10:40 AM to 5:30 PM
Led by Dr Paul Richards DL FSA. Railways and docks triggered Lynn’s first Industrial Revolution in the 1870s with town development encircling the medieval centre rather than cutting through it. London Road was the axis of the Victorian town as population growth before 1850 led to new streets “springing into existence”. The Old Town did not escape some redevelopment and...
Price for single delegate: £30.00
Booking available1915 Sculpture Walk: Victoria Embankment
Thursday 20 June 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM
Philip Ward-Jackson will lead a walk exploring the Victorian and Edwardian sculptural pantheon of the Embankment, which included, somewhat begrudgingly, its own creator, Sir Joseph Bazalgette. This pantheon, initiated after the official opening of the Victoria Embankment on 13 July 1870, became a sort of catch-all for popular figures, some now largely forgotten, whose spheres of activity disqualified them from...
Price for single delegate: £15.00
Booking available1916 Visits to Red House Godalming, Watts Gallery and Limnerslease
Saturday 22 June 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Led by Paul Waite. In the morning we will visit the Watts Gallery, Chapel and Limnerslease where we will have lunch. George Frederic Watts moved to Compton in 1891 and, with his artist wife, Mary Fraser-Tytler, planned a museum devoted to his work, which opened in April 1904, just before his death. The architect of the Gallery was Christopher Hatton...
Price for single delegate: £75.00
Booking available1917 Walk: Walthamstow
Saturday 29 June 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Walthamstow was a middle class town whose course was altered by workmen’s fares on the railway after 1870. This walk, led by Chris Pond, President of the Walthamstow Historical Society, starts at the 1870 railway station, originally called Hoe Street, now Walthamstow (Central). It follows streets of smaller houses, villas and model cottages, to the remarkable largely unchanged 18th to...
Price for single delegate: £15.00
Booking available1918 Charterhouse School and Whiteley Village
Friday 05 July 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM
Led by Paul Waite. Charterhouse School was founded in the seventeenth century and was originally situated near Smithfield in London. In the nineteenth century the Governors agreed to move the School from London. They purchased 68 acres of the Deanery Farm Estate, just outside Godalming. The School arrived there in June 1872. It was designed by Philip Charles Hardwick. We...
Price for single delegate: £60.00
Booking available1919 Kensal Green Cemetery Tour
Thursday 11 July 6:00 PM to 8:00 PM
Led by Robert Stephenson. The General Cemetery of All Souls, Kensal Green is one of England’s oldest and most beautiful public burial grounds, and certainly its most prestigious. One of the world’s first garden cemeteries, and doyen of London’s Magnificent Seven, Kensal Green received its first funeral in January 1833, and still conducts burials and cremations daily. The cemetery has...
Price for single delegate: £20.00
Booking available1920 Kempe Glass and Bodley in Sussex Churches
Wednesday 24 July 10:20 AM to 5:15 PM
A tour led by Adrian Barlow. Adrian has recently published two books on CE Kempe and he will be our guide for the day. Visits to Cuckfield, Horsted Keynes (subject to access) and Danehill will be included. We start at Cuckfield with coffee and a brief illustrated talk followed by a tour of the church (inside and out: Kempe porch,...
Price for single delegate: £45.00
Booking available1998 AGM Weekend in Scarborough
Friday 26 July 2:00 PM to Sunday 28 July 5:00 PM
Organised by Kathryn Ferry. Our AGM weekend will be celebrating the Victorian and Edwardian seaside.
The annual general meeting beginning at 2pm on Friday afternoon will be held in the Palm Court Ballroom of the Grand Hotel, Scarborough (Cuthbert Broderick, 1867). Tea and coffee will be served halfway through. Our evening will be spent at The Spa which developed from an...
Price for single delegate: £460.00
Booking available