When:
November 23, 2016 @ 10:45 am – 12:45 pm
2016-11-23T10:45:00+00:00
2016-11-23T12:45:00+00:00
Where:
The Course at the University Women's Club
2 Audley Square
Mayfair, London W1K
UK
Founded in 1994, THE COURSE offers art history lectures, opera and literature courses, guided museum visits and London walks.
More than any other country on the planet, Britain has pooled its constitutional, financial and cultural forces within its capital. In this series of 6 lectures and 6 accompanying walks we will show HOW LONDON BECAME THE GREATEST CITY ON EARTH. Lecturer, Harry Mount, will explore how, over 2,000 years, London has dealt with six of those forces: the monarchy; the law; religion; finance; entertainment; and education. The story of the Reformation, of constitutional monarchy, of Shakespearean theatre, of the public school, of the common law, the story of Britain…. They can all be told through London’s unique collection of buildings.
Religious London
This lecture (23 November) and accompanying walk (30 N0vember) will explore London’s churches, from Norman to Gothic to Classical while also explaining the development of British religion from Catholicism to Anglicanism. St Bartholomew’s Church, Smithfield explains how the City was the religious heart of Norman London just as it was until the C17th. St Etheldreda’s Church, Holborn, London’s earliest decorated Gothic church was returned to Catholicism in the C19th. (A way of explaining the Reformation in London). With St Paul’s Cathedral, Wren’s deft playing around with plans to fool the Cathedral Commissioners that he was building a perfect Anglican cathedral ended up being a baroque one (a chunk of Rome transplanted to the City). At St Andrew, Holborn, Wren adapted a medieval church to classical Anglicanism while at St Mary Le Bow, he used French classical references. At St Vedast, Foster Lane, he absorbed the baroque, a highly Catholic style, into an Anglican church and at St James’s Piccadilly you will explore how London was spreading into the new West End. Here you will see how Wren created his ideal of the perfect Anglican church, where the congregation could hear/see the priest from all corners of the church and its gallery.