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Bath, The Circus, wood engraving c. 1880.

English Georgian Towns - The art of building and the building arts 1700–1840

Overview Practicalities

Section:

Tour highlights

A wide-ranging survey of the most loved period of English architecture and design.
Includes most of the main concentrations of Georgian urban building in southern England.
Several important interiors, some with exclusive out-of-hours access.
Based in the Georgian resorts of Bath and Brighton, with excursions by coach and rail.

Georgian buildings have long been a byword for good taste and elegance. It might not be true to say that everyone loves a Georgian house, but it certainly is the case that no one harbours a blanket loathing for all things Georgian in the way that many still abhor Victorian architecture and design. Few sights in an English town are lovelier than a stretch of 18th-century or Regency streetscape.

This tour presents many of the finest terraces, squares, mansions and civic buildings in urban England. But it goes beyond merely showing a succession of architectural beauties, for it has a mission to explain how and why these constructions came to be and look as they do through examining such matters as the crafts, skills and materials of the building trade, the complexities and constraints of land ownership and development, the use to which buildings and rooms were put.

The issues of style and taste are central, of course. Why were British houses so different from their counterparts in continental Europe? What impulses or exemplars led to changes in planning and detailing? How is it that so many run-of-the-mill buildings seem so close to perfection? Interiors are a significant ingredient in the tour, with the study of furnishings and decoration, paintwork and colour, heating and lighting, cooking and gardening. Issues around conservation thread through the week, and participants will become expert in spotting later changes and inauthentic features and thereby more appreciative of unspoilt survivors.

The period of the four King Georges (1714–1830) saw Great Britain transformed from an off-shore polity of middling rank to the richest and most respected nation in Europe. A reputation for coarseness, conflict and regicide was supplanted by one of stability, liberty and civility. It was also a time of a deepening sense of national identity which in turn fed through to aesthetics.

Continental styles – assertively grandiloquent, overpoweringly ornamented, oppressively formal – were taken to be the visual manifestation of tyranny, popery and decadence. Britons believed themselves to be free and morally superior, and the ‘simplicité sevère’ of their buildings, their restraint and orderliness, can be presented as a reflection of this. The Englishness of English architecture was a fascinating compound of many factors, as you will discover.

Practicalities

Accommodation as described below; travel by private coach, train and taxi; breakfasts and five dinners with wine, water, coffee; admission to houses and museums visited as a group; all tips; all taxes; the services of the speaker and tour manager.

Hotel Indigo, Bath: a recent conversion of a centrally located Georgian terrace with bright modern rooms. Hotel du Vin, Brighton: well established hotel on the seafront, pleasing interiors and good service. Single rooms are doubles for sole use throughout.

There is quite a lot of walking on the tour. You ought to be able to walk at about three miles an hour for up to half an hour, and to walk at least three miles in a day. There are urban hills and the uneven surfaces of historic paving. Average daily distance by coach: 34 miles.

Are you fit enough to join the tour?

Between 10 and 22 participants.