Gresham College provides outstanding educational talks and videos for the public free of charge. There are over 2,500 videos available on our website. Your support will help us to encourage people's love of learning for many years to come.
London was crucially dependent on continental Europe for its economic resilience in the mid-sixteenth century, and Sir Thomas Gresham’s fortune piggy-backed off the special relationship with Antwerp.
The earliest London-made films showed the Victorian city doing everyday business, before its fictional screen image became increasingly shadowy and sinister.
In the first of a series of lectures on English Romanticism, Jonathan Bate will go on a journey from the Scottish Highlands to a teenage suicide in London to the Geneva of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in search of the origins of Romanticism.
This final lecture will show how Shakespeare helped to immortalize the famous figures of ancient Greece and Rome, and how he in turn became famous after his death.
London is home to two of the oldest working theatres in the world both founded by Charles II’s patents. Professor Thurley looks at the significance and impact of these great institutions on the development of London.
Based on new research into the origins of St. James’s, Simon Thurley looks into the ingredients that went into making a court quarter there and the way it formed a blueprint for the new West End of London.
Nick Lane will explore the importance of energy flow in shaping life from its very origins to the flamboyant complexity around us, and ask whether energy flow would direct evolution down a similar path on other planets.
Professor Steve Jones will consider sunshine and its effects on health, on sleep, on memory and more: and why today’s twilight world of tablets and smart-phones is taking us back to the middle ages.
Simon Thurley, Visiting Professor of the Built Environment unearths the lost mercantile buildings of medieval London and shows how influential they were.