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Updated Journal and Newsletter Indexes

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The indexes and the webpages for the Journal articles, Newsletter research articles, book reviews and obituaries have been brought up to date. 349 out of 368 Journal articles and 977 of 1078 Newsletter pieces are now on the website, the balance representing the Society’s last three years’ publications, that will be released in due course.

A consolidated Excel index to the Society’s Journal, Newsletter research articles and event reports, book reviews and obituaries may be downloaded here. The downloadable index contains additional coding by period, geographical region and furniture type which is not displayed in the tables on this website. These fields can be used to filter and explore the Society’s published material by subject, as well as by author, title, publication year and issue or volume.

I am grateful to Dr Adam Bowett for his kind assistance in devising the coding categories and for diligently combing through the Journal articles and coding them. I am grateful to ChatGPT for assisting me in applying and checking the coding across more than 1,000 Newsletter articles.

Julian Parker

Website Editor

10 August 2026

The coding categories used are:

Period: Before 1500, 16th century, 17th century, 18th century, 19th century, 20th century, and 21st century.

Region: 

Central (Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire)

Channel Islands

East Anglia (Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, Cambridgeshire, Huntingdonshire)

East Midlands (Leicestershire, Lincolnshire, Rutlandshire)

General England

Ireland

Midlands (Warwickshire, Worcestershire, Northamptonshire)

North Midlands (Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Nottinghamshire)

Northeast (Northumberland, County Durham, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Yorkshire)

Northwest (Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire, Cheshire)

Overseas

Scotland

South (Kent, Sussex, Surrey, Middlesex, Hampshire, Berkshire, Isle of Wight)

Southwest (Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Dorset, Wiltshire, Bristol)

Wales

West Midlands (Herefordshire, Shropshire)

Furniture Type:

Architectural woodwork (Misericords, rood screens, choir stalls, doors, panels, pews, pulpits, lecterns)

Beds

Chests

Cupboards & Presses

Dressers

General furniture (including clocks, mirrors)

Other (Bookcases, boxes, caskets)

Other case furniture 

Other seat furniture

Tables, stands

Windsor chairs

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Extended Two-Day visit to North Yorkshire – Friday 4 and Saturday 5 September 2026   

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Thirsk Hall

Day One

Meet at Thirsk Hall at 10am for coffee. We then look at the Gillow furniture and tour the house. Afterwards, we visit St Mary’s church next door to the hall to be shown around by Michael Armstrong. Items of interest include a medieval font cover and boarded chest. Following lunch, we visit Marcus Jacka’s Non-Standard furniture studio, a short drive from town.

Day Two

10.30am, meet for coffee at The White Rose Book Cafe in Thirsk followed by a visit to Treske Furniture for a tour of the factory. In the afternoon we visit St Gregory’s church in Bedale – thirteenth-century in the main and less than thirty minutes’ drive from Thirsk. This has a fortified tower, tomb effigies, fifteenth-century and later wall paintings, poppyhead choir stalls carved by Robert Thompson of Kilburn in 1948, carved woodwork of sixteenth/seventeenth century and furniture including two chests. The day will end with afternoon tea.

Cost: £65. Admission charges, morning coffee and a light lunch are included.

Closing date for applications is now 20 July, numbers strictly limited to 25. 

Please complete the Booking Form and send to RFS Events Team at events.rfs@gmail.com by 20 July 2026. You will be sent payment details in the following week. 

Please indicate if you are travelling by train – Thirsk Station is on the main east coast line – so that lifts to & from the Station can be arranged.

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The 2026 Christopher Gilbert Lecture will be given by the RFS’s American Secretary,  Jeffrey S. Evans

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At West Dean College, West Dean, Chichester, West Sussex. PO18 0QZ 13th July 2026 at 7.30pm.

Same but Different: American Furniture and their British Antecedents

An exploration of American furniture from the colonial period through the early Republic, tracing its roots in the furniture-making traditions of Great Britain. Examining how English, Scottish, Welsh, and Irish design influences were adapted by American craftsmen to suit regional tastes, available materials, and the practical realities of everyday life in America. With a special focus on the vernacular acclimatization of British styles and forms in the American backcountry, along with a comparison of paralleling German and French influences.

The McDowell Family, August Co., Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, Queen Anne walnut dressing table, circa 1760.

Jeffrey S. Evans, President, Senior Auctioneer and Specialist, Jeffrey S. Evans & Associates, Inc., Mt. Crawford, Virginia.

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Regional Furniture Society: Notice of Annual General Meeting 2026

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The 42nd Annual General Meeting of the Regional Furniture Society will be held in the Old Library at West Dean College, near Chichester, Sussex and via Zoom on Thursday 16th July 2026 at 10.30 a.m.

The Agenda, the Minutes of the AGM held in 2025, the Annual Report & Accounts for 2025 and the Social Media Policy have been posted on the website here and will be available at the Conference/AGM.

Members who wish to take part in the AGM via Zoom should email the Acting Secretary on: hancockemm@gmail.com

The access code for the Zoom meeting, the Agenda, the Minutes of the AGM held in 2025, and the Annual Report & Accounts for 2025 will be forwarded a week before the meeting.

The Annual Report and Accounts for 2025 can also be sent to any member requiring a paper version. They should contact the Acting Secretary to request a copy and should send an A4 self-addressed envelope.

Liz Hancock

Acting Secretary

Craigmuir Farm

Sandford, Strathaven

South Lanarkshire ML10 6PT

17 May 2026

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Chair of the Month – March 2026

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Chair of the Month for March is this bedroom chair with a caned seat, made in about 1875 and selected in recognition of International Women’s Day on 8 March. In the 1870s in the Wycombe area, caned seats were increasingly made by women as work in lace making became harder to find and paid less. Women caners worked in the factories, workshops and their own homes, fitting their work around child care, cooking and cleaning. 

This chair is not currently on display. It has been recently cleaned, as part of Wycombe Museum’s Chair Store project. 

Chair of the Month is a partnership between Wycombe Museum and the Regional Furniture Society.

Museum number HIWLH : 1990.38 

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Splats and Spindles: Six English Regional Chairs – Exhibition at The Museum of the Home from 12 May 2026

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Windsor armchair (detail), attributed to Jack Goodchild, c. 1885-1950 © Museum of the Home

Members may wish to note the forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of the Home:

Splats and Spindles: Six English Regional Chairs

Did you know that country chairs have their own language?

For centuries, across the different regions of England, people made chairs for everyday use based on local traditions, using timber and other materials readily available in the area. The craftmanship and design that informed regional chairmaking was passed from generation to generation, and distinct features formed unique chairmaking dialects associated with each region. 

Visitors will get up close with six chairs from the Bernard and Geraldine Cotton Chair Collection and Archive, most of which have not been on display for 20 years. Each chair links to a different region, where you will learn the stories of both celebrated and lesser-known makers, discover how everyday furniture can reflect local history and gain insight into Dr Bernard and Geraldine Cotton’s work.

This display is made possible with funding from the Regional Furniture Society and The Bernard and Geraldine Cotton Fund.

Date

Opens Tuesday 12 May 2026

Where

Undercroft, Home Galleries, Museum of the Home 

136 Kingsland Road E2 8EA

Price

Free

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Regional Furniture Society Sussex Conference – 13 July 2026 to 16 July 2026 at West Dean College

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The Long Gallery at Parham House

The 2026 conference will be held at West Dean College, near Chichester. Accommodation will be in single and double, en-suite student accommodation. The conference package includes an evening meal on Monday 13th July, breakfast, lunch and dinner on Tuesday and Wednesday plus breakfast on Thursday. There will be a more formal dinner on Tuesday evening. All meals will be at West Dean College except on Wednesday when there will be a packed lunch.  In the unlikely event of costs exceeding estimates, the Society may need to levy a surcharge of no more than £50 per person nearer the event.

The programme begins on Monday afternoon with a tour of the Mary Rose at Portsmouth Historic Dockyards and a talk by the Collections Manager focusing on furniture and wooden artifacts. On Tuesday we have a morning visit to the Weald and Downland Museum. In the afternoon at West Dean College, there will be a symposium exploring vernacular chairs made in Sussex and the origins of the Morris designs retailed as ‘Sussex’ chairs. Speakers at this event will be Janet Pennington, Guy Poulter and John Boram. 

On Wednesday we will be on a coach tour for the day, visiting Standen, an Arts and Crafts House in East Grinstead with its original furnishings and collection of Morris Sussex chairs; Parham House, a fine Elizabethan house sensitively restored and furnished with an eclectic mix of furniture and an important textile collection; St Peter’s Church at Parham and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Warminghurst.

Standen from the garden

On Thursday there will be an opportunity in the morning to view the furniture conservation workshops at West Dean and the extensive grounds before the AGM and furniture surgery in the Old Library.

The booking form is here. Please return the form to RFS Events Team by email: events.rfs@gmail.com by March 15th 2026. You will be notified by March 30th if you have a place and payment will be required at that point.

Demi culverin from 1537 © The Mary Rose Trust
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Visit to Mid-Wales Tuesday 26 to Thursday 28 May 2026

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Gregynog Hall

We will start on Tuesday afternoon at Gregynog Hall near Newtown, a fine nineteenth-century mansion with an exceptional early seventeenth-century carved oak room surviving from the earlier house. This was the twentieth-century home of the Davies sisters who were early collectors of impressionist and post-impressionist paintings, all now in the National Museum of Wales. Twentieth-century collections in the house are furniture by Peter Waals and Brynmawr.  Gregynog is the home of the famous private press of the same name. In the early evening, we visit Cwm Weeg, Newtown, a fifteenth-century cruck farmhouse with late twentieth-century extensions and large garden including a grotto. 

On Wednesday morning we meet at Brithdir Hall, Berriew, a sixteenth-century timber-framed house with later Georgian alterations and an interesting collection of early pictures and furniture. Lunch will be at the Horseshoes Inn, Berriew. In the afternoon we will have a tour of Vaynor Park, Berriew, a seventeenth-century brick-built mansion substantially embellished c.1840 by Thomas Penson. It has been home to the current owner’s family since the mid-eighteenth century and its collections include fine twentieth-century pictures. This is followed by an early evening visit to Llanerchydol Hall, near Welshpool, an early nineteenth-century neo-gothic house by one of the Reptons, containing some of the original mirrors and pier tables. 

On Thursday we visit Walcot Hall, Bishops Castle, a brick mansion by William Chambers for 1st Lord Clive, with substantial twentieth-century alterations. Our final visit will be to the Judge’s Lodgings, Presteigne, with early nineteenth-century purpose-built court rooms and cells by Edward Haycock and original furnishings. 

A two-course lunch on Wednesday and Thursday, a two-course supper on Wednesday and tea and cake on all three days is included. 

Numbers will be limited to 30

Cost: £225

Please complete the Booking Form and send to RFS Events Team at events.rfs@gmail.com by 27 March 2026. You will be sent payment details in the following week.