Roads, Bridges, Canals and Landscapes

Roads, Bridges, Canals and Landscapes: How the Georgians' Gradual Transport Revolution Changed Their Society, Landscape and Architecture 

Architectural history often tends to focus on significant buildings and consider them in isolation. However, buildings are shaped by their context: social; economic; topographical; and material. The Georgians’ gradual upgrading of their transport network was one of the most important and far-reaching things that happened in the eighteenth century. It enabled the agricultural revolution, the growth of towns, the formation of a single national market and catalysed the industrial revolution. Steven Brindle considers the significance of the transport revolution for Georgian architecture, how the links between places and buildings can help us understand them and what kind of new understanding and new questions these approaches might generate. To a remarkable extent we still live in a late-Georgian landscape.  

Speaker bio: Steven Brindle read history at Keble College, Oxford and remained there to study for a doctorate on medieval architecture in Spain. He has worked for the last thirty-four years for English Heritage, in a variety of roles, and is currently a senior properties historian in the Curatorial Department. He has published widely on the history of architecture and engineering, with major works including Paddington Station, Its History and Architecture (2004), Brunel, the Man Who Built the World (2005), and Windsor Castle – A Thousand Years of a Royal Palace (as editor, 2018). His latest book is Architecture in Britain and Ireland,   1530–1830, published by the Paul Mellon Centre in 2023.  

Image credit: Thomas Rowlandson, Set of Six Views in London (Turnpike Series), 1813, hand coloured aquatint. Image courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection (B1977.14.21237) 

Host or Publisher Paul Mellon Centre