John Goodall talk

To those who claim social or political authority by virtue of hereditary right, the study of ancestry is not a hobby but a passport to power. For this reason, the gentry and nobility in Georgian society were frequently obsessed by lineage. Histories of architecture tend to focus on novelty but this lecture will consider the reverse: how ancestry and the past were made manifest in the houses of the 18th-century and Regency period, both through the adoption of outmoded styles of architecture, but also through historic fixtures and family trees in parchment, painting and sculpture.