Love, Death and Royalty: Kew Palace and Strawberry Hill House & Gardens
Speakers from two famous West London properties explore the relationships of love, politics and ultimately power and ponder the question of whether love is indeed ‘treacherous’.
Twickenham Museum presents Tea and Empathy: The Twinings tea dynasty & social housing in Victorian Britain
In this talk Ed Harris describes how the Twickenham Museum and other local properties benefitted from the Twining family’s Victorian principle of philanthropic intent with capitalist return
A Return to the Fluorescent Banquet: Feasting at Orleans House Through the Eyes of an Artist
Jonathan Roson from the art collective Alice in Hackneyland talks about his work, ‘The Fluorescent Banquet’, which was commissioned in 2020 to celebrate 300 years of the Octagon Room.
The work and Jonathan’s talk explore centuries of feasting at Orleans House Gallery, the complex relationships entwined within its history, and its significance today.
Poetry, Painting and Alexander Pope
The eighteenth-century poet, Alexander Pope, was a very painterly poet and also much depicted by painters. He was acquainted with artists such as Godfrey Kneller and studied painting with Charles Jervas. His villa in Twickenham was lavishly decorated with portraits, mostly of his wide circle of friends. He also painted pictures in words. Many of his most famous poems, including ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (1712-14) and ‘The Dunciad’ (1728-43) are intensely visual.
17th to 21st Century: Is Ham House Garden Still a Garden of Contemporary Ideas?
Ham House Garden is part restoration and part re-creation of a 17th century landscape, designed with house and garden in harmony, created to impress.