Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 3,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
Simon Lancaster believes that the successful speechwriter is less of a puppeteer and more of an impressionist. In his talk, he will share a number of stories and anecdotes from his time as speechwriter.
In 431 BCE the Athenian statesman Pericles delivered one of the most influential speeches of all time, his Epitaphios or Funeral Oration. The occasion was at the funeral of the first Athenian soldiers to lose their lives in the Peloponnesian War.
There was a time when old places were valued simply for their beauty and interest, but now this is not enough. Are calculations of the financial contribution of our history adding to the value of our heritage or have they fundamentally devalued it?
The blight of the concrete municipal buildings of the 1960s and 70s in the historic centres of our cathedral cities is all too familiar. Everyone wants to avoid the same mistakes being made again, but can we reconcile old and new in our historic cities?
The one built environment issue on which there is political consensus is an urgent need to build more houses. Housebuilding and heritage can be reconciled, but at the moment far too few local authorities know how to do it.