The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries saw many aristocratic landowners developing their London estates, building fine town mansions and laying out elegant squares and terraces, thus creating a fashionable West End. Inigo Jones’s Covent Garden Piazza, built in the 1630s for the 4th Earl of Bedford, was London’s first formally laid out architectural space, but it...

Days of Special Interest are held twice a year at Charlton Village Hall near Shaftesbury which has ample parking in front of the hall for members and guests. The next Day of Special Interest will be held on 18th March 2019 when lecturer Mr. Antony Penrose will be coming along to talk about Lee Miller...

Please click this for lunch arrangements Rosamund Bartlett completed her doctorate at Oxford and is an authority on the cultural history of Russia.  She will be talking to us about how Peter the Great started planning and building this sumptuous city in the 18th century and the remarkable transformations it went through between the 18th...

William Cho, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons Raffles, whose name is synonymous with a luxury hotel rather than the greatest Buddhist temple in the world, was the enlightened colonal administrator of Java, Indonesia. He discovered the 8th century temple of Borobudur, hidden under volcanic ash, in 1814, acquired wondrous artefacts in Java, such as...

HOW HENRY MOORE, BARBARA HEPWORTH AND BEN NICHOLSON CHANGED ART IN BRITAIN Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson are three of the most important British artists of the last century. Friends, neighbours and artistic rivals, their lives were intertwined through their personal relationships as well as through their shared determination to make new and...