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Taking you from Wightwick Manor, a house crammed full of treasures, to the Arts and Crafts churches of Herefordshire and Gloucestershire. This Special Interest tour encompasses a wealth of high Victorian art and architecture.

Your guides are Dr Anne Anderson, a NADFAS lecturer and Art & Crafts specialist whose academic papers have appeared in the Journal of the William Morris Society, Journal of the Pre-Raphaelite Society and many others. Anne will be joined by her husband Dr Scott Anderson, Senior Lecturer in the History of Art and Design and is an Honorary Fellow of the National Association of Valuers and Auctioneers.

Thursday evening: Lecture by Anne Anderson “Understanding the Pre-Raphaelites”

Friday: The Mander family were allegedly inspired to create Wightwick Manor after hearing Oscar Wilde give his famous House Beautiful lecture in Wolverhampton; it is filled with treasures from Burne-Jones’s poignant Love Among the Ruins to G.F Watts’s sumptuous 'Jeanie' Hughes, Mrs Nassau Senior. After lunch continue to Birmingham City Art Gallery to see masterpieces by Ford Madox Brown (The Last of England) John Everett Millais (The Blind Girl), Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Proserpine) and Edward Burne- Jones’s Pygmalion series. Finally you go to St Philip’s Cathedral to marvel at the spectacular reds and pinks of Burne-Jones’s Ascension, Nativity, Crucifixion and Last Judgement windows. Evening talk by Anne Anderson “Victorian Gothic to Arts and Crafts”

Saturday: Travel first to Malvern in Worcestershire and a stop off at The Chapel of the Beauchamp Community where the organist Charles Allsopp will explain the murals and the history of the community of almshouses for the retired agricultural workers from the Madresfield estate. In 2009 a terrific amount of work was completed to refurbish the organ (Nicholsons of Worcester, 1864) and the beautiful but damaged murals in the east end of the building, which have been restored where there has been water damage.
Then onto All Saints' Church at Brockhampton, set high above the River Wye. A perfect Arts and Crafts church enriched with Morris/Burne-Jones tapestries and windows by Christopher Whall. All Saint’s Brockhampton is architect William Lethaby’s masterpiece and the thatched roof belying its completion in 1902. After a light lunch at the Old Court Manor near Ross-On-Wye you will be guided around Kempley’s two delightful churches: St Edward’s, built in 1903 by Randall Wells using local craftsmen, fulfils the idealism of a movement that sought to make work meaningful and pleasurable. Then, after tea and cake in the Village Hall, to the outskirts of the village to visit St. Mary’s which is Kempley’s Norman church, with its astonishing medieval wall paintings, stained glass window by Kempe and the oldest open timber roof structure in NW Europe. Return to your hotel by 17.30.

Please note: Extra nights are available at a supplement, please click here or on the availability tab above to select your date of travel and extra night rates

INCLUDED