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.
In the first of two lectures with the theme ‘Merchants, Money and Megalomania’, Simon Thurley will unearth the lost mercantile buildings of medieval London and show how influential they were.
Jonathan Bate tells the story of how and why Shakespeare was steeped in the classics, from his earliest plays such as Titus Andronicus and The Comedy of Errors to his dramatisations of the stories of Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra.
This opening lecture of the series, with musical illustrations, will use documents, poetry and images to bring the instrument to life, with a particular focus on the autobiography of the beguiling Tudor musician Thomas Whythorne.
Excavations have recently uncovered much evidence of Roman London, including fragments of 405 waxed stylus writing-tablets that can be dated to AD 50-90. Roger Tomlin explains how he deciphered the tablets and what can be learned from them.
Roman London was founded on the banks of the Thames to take advantage of the tidal river for traffic trade and communications. But precisely where were the bridge and the harbour, and what did they look like?
This lecture will explore Utopia’s links both with London and with the civic culture of Renaissance Europe more generally. It will focus on the significance of Utopia at the time when it was written, with some reflections on its remarkably varied legacy.
With London already Europe’s biggest metropolitan consumer market and continuing to grow, and the move to ever larger container ships in the Port, what is the future for the River Thames?