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.
1998 AGM Weekend in Scarborough
Friday 26 July 12:00 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 attendee: £460.00
Sold out1920 A Day in Aldershot
Wednesday 28 August 10:00 AM to 5:30 PM
Military Aldershot owes its existence to the military reforms of the 1850s, after the Duke of Wellington’s death. A training barracks near
open land suitable for large scale exercises was an obvious requirement. And so in 1853 Prince Albert and the new Commander-in-Chief Lord Hardinge selected an empty heath between Aldershot and Farnborough as a location, 8000 acres were bought the following year and work began. The...
Price for single attendee: £60.00
Sold out1921 Walk: Balham to Tooting across the Common
Saturday 14 September 1:45 PM to 5:15 PM
Tony Woolfenden leads a walk to see something of the creation of these late Victorian and Edwardian suburbs. We will include: St Mary’s, Balham, 1807 chapel with grand Baroque refronting of 1904 and recently restored rich 1890s chancel decoration; The Priory, Bedford Hill, scene of the sensational Charles Bravo poisoning mystery of 1876; elaborate terracotta ornament on the houses of the Heaver estate (its developer Alfred Heaver advertised it as...
Price for single attendee: £17.00
Booking available1922 Cambridge: the refurbished David Parr House and a walk
Wednesday 25 September 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM
Led by Michael Hall. Members visited the David Parr House prior to conservation. In 2017/2018, with the generous support of the Heritage Lottery Fund and other funders, the house underwent a full programme of conservation and restoration work and has
recently reopened. On our visit the custodian will guide us in small groups around the house. The house is now fully booked for private
guided...
Price for single attendee: £65.00
Sold out1923 Walk: The Heart of Richmond: Its Victorian and Edwardian heritage
Sunday 29 September 2:00 PM to 4:30 PM
A guided walk around the centre of the Town led by local architect and historian Paul Velluet, to include the remaining parts of the L&SWR
station of 1868, the two late-19th-century station hotels, Arthur Grove’s Arts and Crafts extension to the Church of St John the Divine
of 1905 and his Church Hall of 1911, Frank Matcham’s Richmond Theatre of 1899, Arthur Blomfield’s St...
Price for single attendee: £16.00
Booking available1924.1 Lecture: Oscar Wilde's 1882 Dance: Bringing Artistic Reform to America
Monday 07 October 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
For 359 days, in 1882, Oscar Wilde travelled and delivered more than 140 lectures and talks across the US in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, as well as less likely places such as Leadville, Colorado, San Antonio, Texas, Macon, Georgia, Sioux City, Iowa, Truro, Nova Scotia and Pawtucket, Rhode Island, on the subject of design reform. Very, very popular Wilde,...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available1924.2 Lecture: British Architecture in Burma
Monday 14 October 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Burma, as Philip Davies’s lecture will show, still retains a spectacular legacy of British colonial architecture. For over 60 years the country lay isolated behind a bamboo curtain, but since it has started to open up to the wider world its remarkable heritage is only beginning to be evaluated and appreciated in the face of intense development pressure.
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available1924.3 Lecture: The Shared Heritage of Britain and Calcutta
Wednesday 23 October 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
Calcutta is one of the world’s great cities, full of magnificent nineteenth-century work as well as some good Georgian buildings and a lot of exceptionally good Art Deco architecture. It is also a great British city. William Emerson’s Victoria Memorial Hall may be the greatest building of the Raj anywhere. After thirty five years of communist state government, the city...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available1924.4 Lecture: A Tale of Two Churches: G E Street in Rome
Wednesday 30 October 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
In this lecture G A Bremner will consider the challenges faced by G E Street in his designs for the Anglican churches of St Paul ‘s Within-the-Walls and All Saints’ in Rome. Street’s attentiveness to context and location in his approach to architectural design will be analysed alongside wider concerns on the part of his patrons for buildings that were...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available1925 Visit to the Tower of London
Monday 04 November 2:30 PM to 4:00 PM
For almost 1000 years the Tower of London has been a fortress, a palace and a prison, at once noble and notorious in equal measure.
Beginning in the 1850s, the Tower underwent a period of transformation as the Office of Works set about restoring the iconic castle. The restoration of the Tower was characterised by the ‘remedievalisation’ of the ancient monument, as parts were altered and...
Price for single attendee: £40.00
Sold out1924.5 Lecture: Anglomaniacal American Architecture: British Buildings, American Architects, and the Trans-Atlantic Ruling Class
Wednesday 06 November 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
’All New York aped the English’ recalled an American socialite of the 1880s and 1890s. Horatio Joyce’s lecture will explore the creation of an American aristocracy at the turn of the twentieth century and the special role played by fashionable architects such as McKim, Mead & White, Ogden Codman Jr., and Delano & Aldrich. The architecture of this new world,...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available1924.6 Lecture: Bodley's cathedrals
Monday 11 November 6:30 PM to 8:00 PM
G F Bodley was commissioned to design three cathedrals outside the UK: in Hobart, Tasmania, Washington DC and San Francisco; and to extend two more, in Nagpur, India, and in Lahore, now in Pakistan. These projects, which Michael Hall will examine, remain a little-known aspect of Bodley’s career, despite the fact that the National Cathedral in Washington DC has such...
Price for single attendee: £11.00
Booking available1926 Early cinema and Charlie Chaplin - an afternoon at the Cinema Museum, Kennington
Wednesday 13 November 2:15 PM to 4:15 PM
From 1900 the cinema was a transformative element in people’s lives, providing an utterly novel form of entertainment and a new view
of the wider world. The Cinema Museum, in the former Lambeth workhouse of the 1870s, offers an insight into the early decades of
cinema and we will have a private guided tour, concentrating on those crucial early years. We will also celebrate...
Price for single attendee: £20.00
Booking available1924.7 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.
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
Booking available1928 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 out