Georgian Gothic Architecture, Furniture & Interiors (Twickenham, 17 November 2016)

Dr Peter Lindfield, an expert on the Gothic Revival, will be giving an illustrated 30-minute lecture at Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, on the topic of Georgian Gothic design between 1730 and 1840.

Strawberry Hill and Horace Walpole, along with Thomas Chippendale, Robert Adam, Gillows of Lancaster and A.W.N. Pugin, will figure heavily in the talk. Architecture, interiors and furniture will be covered as well as key issues of design, fashion and taste in the Georgian period.

Following a Q&A session and a champagne reception, Peter will be signing copies of his new book at this launch party, Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730-1840. 

Copies of the book will be available on the night for purchase at a specially reduced price (£35: RRP £50). You can select a registration option for the talk and reception only, or additionally pre-purchase the book to be signed and collected on the night.

A description of Georgian Gothic:

The Gothic Revival, rich, ambitious, occasionally eccentric, but nonetheless visually exciting, is one of Britain’s greatest contributions to early modern design history, not least because for the most part it contravened approved taste: Classicism. Scholars have tended to treat Georgian Gothic as an homogenous and immature precursor to “high” Victorian Gothic, and centred their discussion around Walpole’s Strawberry Hill. This book, conversely, reveals how the style was imaginatively and repeatedly revised and incorporated into prevailing eighteenth-century fashions: Palladianism, Rococo, Neoclassicism and antiquarianism. It shows how under the control of architects, from Wren to Pugin, Walpole and Cottingham, and furniture designs, especially Chippendale, a shared language of Gothic motifs was applied to British architecture, furniture and interiors. Georgian Britain was awash with Gothic forms, even if the arbiters of taste criticised it vehemently. Throughout, the volume reframes the Gothic Revival’s expression by connecting it with Georgian understandings of the medieval past, and consequently revises our interpretation of one of the most influential, yet lampooned, forms of material culture at the time.