Lectures

OAHS Lecture Programme


Our annual lecture programme comprises 10 lectures.

In January and February lectures will be online on Zoom, and members can book a place by clicking the link in the description in order to receive the link. Booking for these lectures will open in December. The final lecture in March will be live at Rewley House and also available on Zoom.

For lectures held online using Zoom, booking is required. The list closes at midnight on the Sunday before the lecture or sooner if we reach capacity. As Zoom only allows 100 people to log in for each lecture, OAHS members will be given priority. One booking covers everyone who will be listening on one device, so your household companions are welcome to join you. Bookings for the 2024 lectures will open in December.

We will record each of the online lectures, if the speaker agrees, and the recording will be available for members shortly afterwards for about a month.

Oxford's Library Buildings


Date: 12 December 2023
Time: 17.30-18.30
Lecturer: Geoffrey Tyack
Location: Rewley House
Cost: Free
No of Places: 110


No Booking Required

Oxford’s libraries are among the best and most comprehensive in the world. From the 13th century onwards the university, the colleges and eventually the city have needed to accommodate ever-growing collections of books and manuscripts: a problem that, despite the recent spread of digital resources, has still not gone away. This lecture discusses the changing responses to this challenge, drawing attention both to well-known libraries, including the Bodleian, and to smaller and less frequented examples, many of them of great architectural interest.

Dr Geoffrey Tyack is the current President of OAHS. He is an architectural historian, and has written extensively on the architecture of Oxford and Oxfordshire. Together with Dan Paton he is writing an illustrated book on the architecture of Oxford’s university, college and city libraries, to be published next year.

Oxford Buildings and the Reconstruction of Royalist Government 1642-1646


Date: 09 January 2024
Time: 17.30-18.30
Lecturer: Kirsty Wright
Location: Online on Zoom
Cost: Free
No of Places: 110
Closing Date for Bookings: 05 January 2024


Booking for Zoom

In the 1640s the outbreak of war in England divided government between the King at Oxford and Parliament at Westminster. This talk explores how administrative institutions, the law courts and exchequer, were re-established at Oxford and the role of the city's distinctive architecture in shaping the form and function of royalist government.

Dr Kirsty Wright has recently completed a DPhil at the University of York. Her research takes an architectural approach to administrative history, and she now works for Historic Royal Palaces.

Recent Discoveries at Frewin Hall Oxford: A Lost College and so much more


Date: 23 January 2024
Time: 17.30-18.30
Lecturer: Ben Ford
Location: Online on Zoom
Cost: Free
No of Places: 110
Closing Date for Bookings: 19 January 2024


Booking for Zoom

Partially excavated and researched by Prof. John Blair in the 1970s, the central Oxford site of Frewin Hall (formerly St Mary's College) has now been excavated by Ben Ford for Oxford Archaeology in advance of construction for Brasenose College student accommodation. Initial interpretation suggests that a large Bronze Age burial mound influenced the occupation of the site 3,000 years later as a focus for pagan burial before Oxford existed, and later in the first century of urban development. The site became part of a large post-Conquest urban landholding for local Norman elites. Frewin Hall itself dates from this period and is probably the oldest secular building still in use in Oxford. The Cistercians of Oseney Abbey established St Mary’s College on the site in the 15th century but it was dissolved at the Reformation, to be buried over the next 500 years under many feet of rich garden soils.

Ben M Ford BA MCIfA SMSTS FSA, Senior Project Manager, Oxford Archaeology. Over the last 13 years Ben has principally focused on excavations in Oxford; his project at the Westgate won British Archaeologies 2016 Project of the Year, and more recently Frewin Hall won the Oxford Preservation Trust’s 2023 Temporary Project Certificate.  Ben is the author of a number of monographs and articles, with many more in the pipeline.

An Oxford Architectural Dilemma – The Tinbergen Building


Date: 06 February 2024
Time: 17.30-18.30
Lecturer: John Stevenson
Location: Online on Zoom
Cost: Free
No of Places: 110
Closing Date for Bookings: 02 February 2024


Booking for Zoom

This 1960s Brutalist building, designed by Sir Leslie Martin, was demolished in 2020. It was one of the largest teaching and research buildings in Oxford and housed the Zoology and Experimental Psychology laboratories. It was also a pioneering and expressive work of architecture of its time. Brutalist or raw concrete buildings brought about new advances in structural and spatial design producing flexible light-filled spaces, often on a gigantic scale. But this exuberant form of architecture later fell into disrepute with many buildings panned as ‘concrete monstrosities’. This talk will look at the ideas which inspired this generation of buildings, and how they were viewed then and since, framed in the context of how we regard our C20 heritage and the new agenda on environmental responsibility.

John Stevenson graduated from the Architectural Association School in London. Following qualification as an architect, he entered practice and taught design part-time. In the mid 1980s whilst continuing to practice in London, he took up a part-time design teaching post at the Oxford School of Architecture (then Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes). He then moved to Oxford where he has lived and worked ever since. He retired from the Oxford School as Principal Lecturer and Head of Design in 2012. During and since that time he has served on the Oxford Preservation Trust’s Environmental Awards Committee.

The Deserted Manor and Village of Besselsleigh: from Anglo-Saxon Beginnings to the Civil War


Date: 20 February 2024
Time: 17.30-18.30
Lecturer: John Stevenson
Location: Online on Zoom
Cost: Free
No of Places: 110
Closing Date for Bookings: 16 February 2024


Booking for Zoom

The remains of the original manor and village of Besselsleigh, south-east of Oxford, lie beneath estate pasture. But Besselsleigh has played a more significant role in local and national events over the last 1,000 years than its quiet location might suggest. Excavations by AAARP (the Appleton Project) in the past three years have uncovered Anglo-Saxon features and the layout of the medieval manor with its strongly built stone walls, and have also charted the impact of Civil War attacks and seventeenth-century estate improvement, the use of the buildings by a notable school for young women and its demise in the eighteenth century.

Dr Jane Harrison is a Research Associate and Tutor in Archaeology at OUDCE. Between 2010 and 2015, she was a leading archaeologist and researcher on OUDCE’s East Oxford Project. She is currently the Fieldwork Director of the Appleton Area Archaeological Research Project, along with Trevor Rowley.

THE TOM HASSALL LECTURE 2024
Remember Me: Inscriptions of Medieval Oxfordshire


Date: 05 March 2024
Time: 17.30-18.30
Lecturer: Elizabeth Gemmill
Location: Rewley House and Online on Zoom
Cost: Free
No of Places: 110
Closing Date for Bookings: 03 March 2024


Booking for Zoom

OAHS Members only Non-members may join OAHS to attend this lecture - see the Join page
You do NOT need to book if you wish to attend this lecture in person.

Medieval inscriptions have come down to us in a range of media: brass, stone, stained glass, wood, paint, and textiles; and they are encountered in a diversity of settings. Many can be found in their intended locations, mainly churches, chapels, and colleges; some are in libraries or museums. Yet others are known to us only from the painstaking notes and drawings made by antiquaries. But, taken together, these artefacts are a priceless repository of evidence about the lives of communities in the past, about the cares and concerns of the people who commissioned and made them, and about the material culture of the medieval city and county of Oxford.

Dr Elizabeth Gemmill is Associate Professor in History in the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education, and a Fellow of Kellogg College. She is the editor, with the late Jerome Bertram, of Mediaeval Inscriptions: The Epigraphy of the City of Oxford (2020) and Mediaeval Inscriptions: The Epigraphy of the County of Oxfordshire (2024) published by the Oxfordshire Record Society.