Events

What follows is a chronological list of what is currently planned by way of visits to museums, galleries and other places of interest,  gallery talks, Behind the Scenes visits in the city, Saturday afternoon talks and special events where the Friends will have a presence.

Following that is a list of online events that the museum service is organizing.

We hope you will find things to interest you.

Please note: if you book online, the payment receipt from PayPal does not mean that you have secured a place.  The organizer receives a weekly update of such payments and will email you to advise when you have a firm booking.

Also, Behind the Scenes visits and gallery tours are usually restricted to groups of around 15.  If such an event attracts a larger number of applications, as it often does, the organizer will try to arrange a second (or more) tour(s), which could be at a later time on the advertised day or on a later date.  If this occurs, the organizer will contact you to make the appropriate arrangements.

Please note:
Members may take photographs when we are on our trips to illustrate an article about the visit that will appear in the following newsletter.
Please make it clear to the organizer if you do not wish to feature in any such picture.

Coughton Court is a Grade I-listed Tudor mansion near Alcester, home to the Catholic Throckmorton family for more than 600 years and full of links to historical events, including the Gunpowder Plot.

Cost: £35.00 per person (+£17 each for non-NT members).

To book a place online use the panel below:

A form for postal bookings was included with the September newsletter.

Contact: Carol Lear; carolear@btinternet.com; 0117 942 3610.

No need to book but do come along to find out what our funds have bought for the museums’ collections, following a short AGM.

Tea / coffee and cake will be served.

The museum has redisplayed its collection of early and more recent domestic appliances as well as distribution equipment and metering.

This  event is now fully booked.  Please do not book online unless you are happy to go on the waiting list.

Cost: £8.00 per person.

To book a place online use the panel below:

A form for postal bookings was included with the September newsletter.

Contact: Richard Avery; membership@friendsofbmga.org.uk; 0117 329 6656.

Catherine Littlejohns, Curator of Historic Houses, will assemble and discuss a cross-section of costume items dating from the 18th to the mid-20th centuries.

Cost: £9.50 per person.

To book a place online use the panel below:

A form for postal bookings was included with the September newsletter.

Contact: Carol Ouvry; carol@ouvry.myzen.co.uk; 0117 302 1039.

Scientists are meant to view the subject of their research with detached objectivity, but during volcanic eruptions they live and work with communities dealing with ash, evacuations and general mayhem.  For decades, scientists at Bristol University have been responding to volcanic crises in the Eastern Caribbean, profoundly influencing their research.  Montserrat (one of these volcanic islands) is also a literary island and creatives have also responded to these challenges.

The speaker, Professor Jenni Barclay, is a volcanologist and holds the AXA Chair in Volcanology at the University of Bristol.  Jenni’s research focusses on the reduction of risk and prevention of disaster in volcanic settings.   She also has a long term interest in public engagement and the important role of the environmental sciences in everyone’s lives in general.

To book a place for the in-person talk or to register for the simultaneous online broadcast, click here to be taken to the M Shed website.

The Museum Winter Lecture series is sponsored by The Friends

Bristol Museum and Art Gallery has a fine collection of paintings by French artists, including landscapes.  Jonathan Camp, a freelance lecturer in the history of art, will guide us through the best 19th century French landscape paintings.

Cost: £9.50 per person.

Please note the earlier start time of 2.00pm.

To book a place online use the panel below:

A form for postal bookings was included with the September newsletter.

Contact: Catherine Dixon; blackrockcfd@hotmail.com; 01275 849200.

Alongside the world-class collections at RAMM there will be an exhibition, Wild, on re-connecting with the natural world, plus Recording Nature: a display including nature records from six collectors as well as some of their specimens; and What Do You Collect: a collection of old staplers from mid to late 20th century.

Cost: £42.50 per person.

To book a place online use the panel below:

A form for postal bookings was included with the September newsletter.

Organizer: Richard Avery; membership@friendsofbmga.org.uk; 0117 329 6656.

For something a bit different, this year Dyrham House invites visitors on a special journey through time, exploring Christmas through the ages from Tudor times right up to the 21st century.  The house will be dressed with festive decorations from five different eras including a 1999 / millennium room.

Cost: £37.50 per person (+ £21.00 each for non-NT members).

To book a place online use the panel below:

A form for postal bookings was included with the September newsletter.

Organizer: Richard Avery; membership@friendsofbmga.org.uk; o117 329 6656.

Bring friends and family to this candlelit celebration of Christmas in the mediaeval church of St Stephen’s.  There will be singing of carols by all, as well as readings, and carols and songs sung by our guest choir, The Redmaids’ High Community Voices conducted by Jo Scullin.

Cost: £15.00 per adult; £30.00 for one adult and up to three children; £45.00 for two adults and up to three children.

To book a place online use the panel below:

A form for postal bookings was included with the September newsletter.

Contact: Sally Dore; sally.dore@cantab.net; 0117 942 2620.

The two great early nineteenth-century British landscape painters Turner and Constable have long been compared and contrasted. These sorts of  comparisons  between famous artist contemporaries – one thinks also of Gainsborough and Reynolds or Picasso and Matisse – can be illuminating. However they can also be misleading, which is arguably the case for Turner and Constable who are too often seen as rivals rather than as artistic colleagues both striving for the promotion of a new type of British landscape art.

The speaker, Anne Lyles, is an art historian and independent curator specialising in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century British landscape painting.  She worked at Tate Britain for twenty-five years and has co-curated, and contributed to the catalogues of, many exhibitions on the art of J M W Turner, John Constable and British watercolours.

To book a place for the in-person talk or to register for the simultaneous online broadcast click here to be taken to the museum’s website.

The Museum Winter Lecture series is sponsored by The Friends

In the halls of natural history museums all over the world, you can peer through the glass and come  face-to-face with the ghosts of extinction. Extinction has been going on as long as there has been biological life – in fact over 99% of all species that have ever existed on Earth are extinct – but extinction usually happens at a slow pace.  We are now, however, living through the Sixth Mass Extinction, with species rapidly going extinct because of human actions.

In this talk, based on her new book Ghosts Behind Glass: Encountering Extinction in Museums (University of Chicago Press, 2025), our speaker will take visitors on a journey to encounter the extinct.   Dolly Jørgensen is Professor of History at the University of Stavanger, Norway. Her research focuses on cultural histories of animals.

To book a place for the in-person talk or to register for the simultaneous online broadcast, click here to visit the museum’s website.

The Museum Winter Lecture  series is sponsored by The Friends

This final lecture of the current series is about the Neolithic monument of Avebury and the exciting new interpretations that are emerging from new campaigns of fieldwork and archive investigation.  One of the pre-eminent monumental landscapes of Europe, Avebury has been vexing researchers since its discovery as an object of antiquarian enquiry in the mid 17th century.  However, despite nearly 400 years of study, what we don’t know about Avebury still dwarfs what we do.  In an attempt to rectify this, the last decade has seen a burst of new studies at the site; investigations that are not only challenging and unsettling accepted stories, but also shedding remarkable new light on the emergence and history of this monumental landscape.

The speaker, Professor Mark Gillings, is a landscape archaeologist based in the Department of Anthropology and Archaeology of the University of Bristol.   He fell in love with Avebury as a child after watching Children of the Stones (from behind the sofa, naturally) and has been carrying out fieldwork at the site with his friend Josh Pollard (University of Southampton) for nigh on 30 years.

To book a place for the in-person talk or to register for the simultaneous online broadcast click here to be taken to the museum’s website.

The Museum Winter Lecture series is sponsored by The Friends