Date/Time
Date(s) - 07/03/2024
7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
Location
Leicester Bowling Club
Spring lecture preceded by a short AGM
When the Duke of Wellington witnessed Joseph Paxton at work at Chatsworth, he exclaimed “I’d have liked that man as one of my generals.” Paxton was one of the most inventive and influential figures of the 19th century, whose most famous masterwork, the Crystal Palace of 1851, is considered by significant contemporary architects like Norman Foster to be ’the birth of modern architecture’. Born into a humble farming family, as gardener, engineer, designer, architect, publisher, railway investor and MP, Paxton was to leave his mark on Victorian Britain like few others.
For more than 30 years he worked at Chatsworth, supported by his formidable wife Sarah, enhancing it with innovative buildings and garden designs in a close partnership with his patron the 6th Duke of Devonshire. His boundless energy and vision found its greatest expression in his radical design for the Great Exhibition, where the ‘industry of all nations’, and a dazzled populace, gathered under his vast glass structure. My lecture celebrates the man and his achievements which have profoundly influenced architecture ever since.
ABOUT SIMON SELIGMAN
He has an art history degree, and has been giving public lectures for 30+ years. He worked at the historic estate of Chatsworth, in Derbyshire, for 19 years, latterly as their head of communications, and give a number of talks about its art collections (ancient and modern, garden and park landscape, history and family, including a lecture on Deborah, the Mitford Duchess of Devonshire, who he knew well. He was lucky enough to lecture around the UK, in Europe and all over the USA on behalf of Chatsworth, and now take that experience, and close knowledge of his subject, to audiences around the UK as a freelance lecturer.
The lecture will be followed by the usual tea/coffee and cake. Please let Elizabeth (0116 2705711) know if you can bake a cake for this meeting.
Guests are welcome at a cost of £3.00
Annual General Meeting
Before the talk we will have a short AGM
1. Apologies
2. Chairman’s Report
3. Treasurer’s Report
4. Membership Secretary’s Report
5. Education Report (circulated before the meeting)
6. Events’ Secretary’s Report (circulated before the meeting)
7. Research Group Report (circulated before the meeting)
8. Election of Officers
9. Any Other Business: