2018 marks the bicentenary of the passing of the Church Building Act, the first nation-wide non-military exercise of architectural patronage by central government in England and Wales. To commemorate and contextualise this event, and place it in global comparative perspective, there will be an international conference to be held at Lambeth Palace Library on 6-7 September 2018.

Keynote speakers represent the international scope of the conference:

  • Shirine Hamadeh (Koç University, Turkey), author of The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth Century (Seattle and London: The University of Washington Press, 2007)
  • Freek Schmidt (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), author of Passion and Control. Dutch Architectural Culture of the Eighteenth Century (Farnham: Ashgate, 2016)
  • Henriette Steiner (University of Copenhagen), author of The Emergence of a Modern City: Golden Age Copenhagen 1800-1850 (London and New York: Routledge, 2014)
  • Richard Wittman (University of California at Santa Barbara), author of Architecture, Print Culture, and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century France (London and New York: Routledge, 2007)

20 minute papers are invited on all aspects of architectural patronage in the period 1760-1840, in Great Britain and beyond. Priority may be given to papers addressing issues of State patronage at national or local level and/or papers which look beyond case studies of individual buildings/patrons. We are also very keen for speakers to represent a range of disciplines, including history, literature, music, performance studies etc.

Questions to be addressed include, but are not limited to:

  • Role of new and/or non-traditional groups as patrons (professional bodies, artisan organisations, gentlemanly societies, women etc)
  • Patronage of new building types
  • New models of patronage (subscriptions, tontines, new forms of taxation etc)
  • The role of patronage in the emergence of general contracting
  • The patron/architect relationship
  • Communication and decision-making among corporate patrons
  • Architectural patronage as discourse and the significance of architectural patronage to those involved
  • Patronage networks
  • Architectural patronage in colonial contexts and/or beyond the Anglophone world

Abstracts of 300 words plus CV should be sent to Alexandrina.Buchanan [at] liverpool.ac.uk by 11 March 2018.

This conference is supported by an AHRC Networking Grant, ‘Architecture and Society in an Age of Reform, 1760-1840’. The University of Liverpool would also like to acknowledge the support of Lambeth Palace Library and the Georgian Group.