ORDINARY MEETING OF FELLOWS LECTURE

George Shaw: Entrepreneurial Architect–Antiquary–Forger by Dr Peter N. Lindfield FSA

Maturing in the shadow of the Northern industrial revolution and working in his family’s woollen mills, Shaw is an unsung antiquary and a hero of the Victorian Gothic Revival. Guided by an insatiable love of history, he drew, collected, and, on occasion, recreated the material trappings of his armigerous ancestors from Lancashire and West Yorkshire. What flowered as a teenage passion, Shaw’s life-long antiquarian pursuits were guided by his friends within the local vicar network headed by the Revs Francis Raines and Dr Hey. He was also an intimate friend of Sir Samuel Rush Meyrick and co-designer of Meyrick’s Gothic home, Goodrich Court in Herefordshire.  

Leaving the woollen industry behind, Shaw established an architectural practice in the 1840s from his home in Uppermill leveraging knowledge amassed during antiquarian studies. Earlier, Shaw recast his family home, St Chad’s, in an heroic style speaking of a bygone age. Romantically ‘re-olding’ St Chad’s—guided by a love of Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels and Roxburghshire home, Abbotsford—Shaw wished to counteract the house’s 1807 rebuilding in an unassumingly ‘dull’ style by his uncle.

Swelling in ambition and reputation, Shaw’s outfit employed up to 100 craftsmen and repeatedly applied this antiquarian ‘re-olding’ to ancient churches and homes. Shaw also created new asymmetric country houses in the style. Like Pugin, Shaw was the consummate designer: blending his antiquarian infatuation with engrained entrepreneurial spirit and mischievousness, Shaw used his knowledge of ancient oak furniture to create and sell his workshop’s modern fabrications as genuine historical ‘relics’, especially from Tudor England. Defrauding Northern aristocrats with his fakes—the Duke of Northumberland and Earl of Derby included—Shaw even applied this spirit to create funerary brasses.  

Dr Peter N. Lindfield is a lecturer in architectural history at the Welsh School of Architecture, Cardiff University. A Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, Peter has worked extensively on antiquarian forgery and the Gothic Revival. His Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellowship at Manchester Metropolitan University (2016–19) examined the former, and his monograph The Intimacies of George Shaw (1810–76): Diaries and Correspondence of an Architect, Antiquary, and Forger will be published by The Chetham Society in December 2024. It is the first work to present extensive, edited, and annotated transcripts of Shaw’s diaries and letters: Intimacies offers unparallelled insight into Shaw’s architectural and antiquarian interests, and the material contained within underpins the lecture.  Peter has also published extensively on Gothic design, including Georgian Gothic: Medievalist Architecture, Furniture and Interiors, 1730-1840 (Boydell & Brewer, 2016), here, and Unbuilt Strawberry Hill (Shaun Tyas, 2023), here. In 2023–24 Peter ran the first phase of an Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded impact project, Tudor Template for A Northern Rogue, here, connecting some of Shaw’s architectural and furnishing projects and related Tudor sites. 

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This event will be both in person at Burlington House and online. Please select the appropriate ticket below.

Attendance at Burlington House:
Open to anyone to attend.
The event will begin at 5pm, with tea/coffee from 4.30pm.
Pre-registration is essential for non-Fellows but we encourage Fellows to register as well.
Fellows must ensure they sign the guest book.
Sherry is served in the Foyer following the lecture.

Attendance online:
The event will be live-streamed on Zoom (if you register) and recorded on our YouTube channel.
The event will begin at 5pm.
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