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.
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.
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.
The visit will start at 10:00, with a welcome and coffee at the Wycombe Museum. We will have a talk by curator Catherine Grigg on chair making in the area followed by an update on the chair conservation work and development of the new store, the Chair Discovery Centre. This is a major project to which the RFS has contributed grant funding. There will then be time for a self-led visit round the galleries before lunch of sandwiches and cake.
In the afternoon we will walk to the Chair Discovery Centre, a 5-minute walk down the hill.
The visit will finish at 4:00pm.
For members arriving by train, the museum is a few minutes’ walk from the station. There is limited on-site parking at the museum, with disabled parking available. Metered road-side parking and car parks are available within a five-minute walk.
Numbers will be limited to 20
Cost: £40.00
Please complete the Booking Form and send to RFS Events Team at events.rfs@gmail.com by 26 February. You will be sent payment details in the following week.
Museum location and contact:
Wycombe Museum Priory Avenue High Wycombe HP13 6PX
N.B. The Museum is closed on the Monday of the Reception: when you attend please enter by the Hoxton Station Entrance.
Members of the Regional Furniture Society and Furniture History Society are invited to a celebratory reception in honour of the 50 years Bill and Gerry Cotton have devoted to Regional Furniture Studies.
Just over 50 years ago, Bill Cotton was drawn to the possibility that country furniture could be defined by regional characteristics influenced by geography, materials, trade, rural customs and traditional ways of life. He and Gerry started collecting chairs with makers’ stamps and brands which they referenced to trade directories, census returns and newspaper archives to establish provenance. And so began a lifetime project to identify the makers and define the regional distinctions of furniture made across the British Isles.
This reception at the Museum of Home will be a moment to reflect on their achievement and acknowledge the significance of the Cotton Chair Collection and Archive they have donated to the museum, and the massive indexes of English regional furniture makers now being added to BIFMO.
There will be short tributes led by Liz Hancock and Simon Swynfen Jervis at 2.30pm.
There is no charge for this event, but you are required to register. Places are limited and will be allocated first come, first served. To register please email your details to: events.rfs@gmail.com
Scottish Furniture, 1500-1914, about to be published by National Museums Scotland is the first comprehensive narrative account of furniture-making in Scotland. In this lecture, the book’s author, Stephen Jackson, will guide us through the evolving landscape of Scottish furniture-making with particular reference to national and regional characteristics.
Based in Edinburgh, Stephen is editor of the Regional Furniture Society’s annual journal. Graduating from Cambridge in 1993, his career with furniture started in London at the Geffrye Museum, now the Museum of the Home. He wrote a MPhil with David Jones at St Andrews before becoming a curator at Middlesex University and then at the Victoria and Albert Museum. He joined National Museums Scotland in 1999 and the new book is the culmination of many years of research during which he travelled extensively to study furniture in the wild.
To attend this on-line talk, please apply to the RFS Events organiser by 15th June at events.rfs@gmail.com. You will then be sent a link shortly before the event.
This visit is an exclusive RFS event, whilst the previously listed Symposium is not.
We will meet for coffee in the café of the Parkinson Building, where Mark Westgarth, Associate Professor in Art History & Museum Studies at the University, will talk to us about the library of mainly British furniture books and manuscripts dating from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries, created by the antiques dealer John Victor Bedford (1941-2019) and gifted to the University of Leeds. Mark is lead curator of the exhibition, which runs until 21 December 2024.
We then travel by public transport to Temple Newsam Museum, which has a cafe for lunching. Adam Toole, Curator of and Furniture and Decorative Art will show us some of the vernacular furniture acquired by Christopher Gilbert, the museum curator and founding member of the RFS who was based at Temple Newsam for his entire working life. The day finishes at 16:30
Cost of the day £10, (refreshments not included) A booking form is available to print from here.
A unique expression of the Arts & Crafts movement .
In 1899 Frank and Florence Dickinson got engaged and began designing their home in leafy Surrey. It was a long engagement since Frank was unprepared to marry until he had built their dream home. He left school at the age of 13 and worked for most of his life as a draftsman for Doultons Pottery in Lambeth. When he met Florence, he was living in crowded accommodation with his family in Paddington. He became a follower of William Morris and John Ruskin and the house was created to reflect their ideals.
Frank studied books on construction and borrowing £300 built Little Holland House himself with the help of his brother and a friend. He went to night school to learn metalwork and furniture making. Florence was a talented embroiderer and seamstress. Virtually everything in the house was made by one or other of them over a period of sixty years. They raised a family at Little Holland House, Frank encouraging his son in furniture making. Their well-crafted pieces show the influence of Charles Voysey. The house remains exactly as it was left on the death of Frank in 1971 and the departure of Florence a year later, when it was bought by Sutton Council and opened to the public.
To join this visit please book on-line: sutton.events.mylibrary.digital or dial Sutton Library: 020 8770 4740. Visits are available for limited numbers at half-hour intervals 11-17:00. Some members are booked for 11:00, so I suggest aiming for a similar time . If you do book please contact Jeremy Bate, events organiser so that he has an idea of who will be visiting.
Little Holland House , 40 Beeches Avenue Carshalton, Surrey. There is free parking on the road and the house is a 5 minute walk from Carshalton Beeches station ( 44 minutes from Victoria )
House of The Binns; image: National Trust for Scotland
A family home founded by Thomas Dalyell about 1612, an Edinburgh merchant who made his fortune at the court of King James VI and I in London. Presented to the National Trust for Scotland in 1947 by Eleanor (Nora) Dalyell, mother of the late MP Tam Dalyell. The family retain the right to live there. Much altered and extended in the 18th and 19th century, the house contains an eclectic mix of furniture and works of art from all eras, including political and military memorabilia, associated with its more colourful owners, including General Tam Dalyell who escaped from the Tower of London and fought alongside Peter the Great’s father in Russia.
Kathleen Dalyell and Helen Knox, NTS Manager will be our hosts whilst David Jones has kindly agreed to guide us through the furniture.
Coffee will be provided on arrival. At the end of the visit a nearby venue for lunch will be suggested (not included in the fee). If you are a member of the National Trust or Scottish National Trust, please remember your membership card. If numbers exceed 12, we may need to progress in two parties.
Linlithgow is easily reached from Glasgow or Edinburgh by train. Members with cars will pick up travellers from the station.
If you wish to join the visit, a cheque for £10 a head, payable to Regional Furniture Society should be posted to : RFS Events Organiser, 2 Grove Cottages, Sutherland Road London W4 2QS together with a list of members and friends attending and a mobile telephone number. Alternatively, make a bank transfer to the RFS sort code 30-94-81 a/c 00882432 quoting reference: ‘Binns’, followed by an email to the events organiser, confirming the names of those attending, mobile number and the date of the bank transfer. Closing date for applications is Monday September 4th.
As members may be aware, a tour of the Southern States of America is planned for October 2024, studying the regional furniture, houses and social context of early settlers, later migrants, farmers and tradespeople, plantation owners and slaves during the 18th and 19th centuries.
We will be guided by Dan Ackerman, Chief Curator and Director of Research at MESDA and RFS American Secretary, whose specialist knowledge in this area is based on many years of academic research and fieldwork.
The tour will be over 11 days from Monday 14 October to Thursday 24 October, with flights to and from Charlotte International airport, and starting at MESDA (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts) and Old Salem Museum in North Carolina, heading north to the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, then east to Colonial Williamsburg and from there south down the coast to Charleston, South Carolina, before returning to MESDA. The tour dates are such that if any of us wanted to stay on for the biennial MESDA furniture seminar, which will be on Friday 25 to Saturday 26 October, it would be simple to do so.
The provisional itinerary is attached below.
We provisionally estimate the cost at £2,500 per person, including flights, accommodation (based on 2 people per room), admissions and insurance etc, but not including lunches and dinners, which will be paid for as we go.
If you are interested in joining the tour, please email events.RFS@gmail.com by 15 September 2023. Those members who have already been in touch about the tour need not respond to this call: you are already on the list.
David Dewing, tour organiser
Provisional Itinerary
Flights from UK to Charlotte International airport, arriving Monday October 14 Tour over 11 days (10 nights) Depart Charlotte International Airport, Thursday October 24 Option to stay Friday and Saturday 25-26 for the biennial MESDA Furniture Seminar
Day 1: Monday October 14
Transfer from Charlotte to MESDA and Old Salem Museums, North Carolina, 84 miles Welcome, introduction and first supper Stay 2 nights MESDA, Monday and Tuesday
Period Room at MESDA (Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts)
Day 2: Tuesday October 15
MESDA and Old Salem Museums, sites and collections Research and Conservation facilities
Miksch House, Old Salem
Day 3: Wednesday October 16
Travel from MESDA to Harrisonburg, Shenandoah Valley, Virginia, 215 miles Frontier Culture Museum (Staunton, Virginia) Stay 2 nights, Harrisonburg, Wednesday and Thursday
Day 4: Thursday, October 17
Shenandoah Valley Collections Museum of the Shenandoah Valley Two Winchester-area private collections Jeff and Beverley Evans Collection (Dinner)
Frontier Culture Museum, Staunton, Shenandoah Valley, Virginia
Day 5: Friday, October 18
Travel from Harrisonburg to Williamsburg, Virginia, 180 miles Monticello en route, home of Robert Jefferson, house, gardens and slave quarters Stay 2 nights, Williamsburg, Friday and Saturday
Monticello, Virginia
Colonial Williamsburg
Day 6: Saturday, October 19
Art Museums of Colonial Williamsburg Williamsburg houses and sites Research and conservation facilities
Conservation Workshops Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia
Day 7: Sunday October 20
Travel to from Williamsburg to Edenton, North Carolina, 111 miles Cupola House Private Collections
Stay 1 night, Edenton, Sunday
Cupola House, Edenton, North Carolina
Day 8: Monday October 21
Travel from Edenton to Wilmington, North Carolina, 177 miles Free time in Wilmington Stay 1 night, Wilmington, Monday
Roanoke River Lighthouse, Edenton
Day 9: Tuesday, October 22
Travel from Wilmington to Charleston, South Carolina, 176 miles Drayton Hall plantation house en route Stay 2 nights, Charleston, Tuesday and Wednesday
Drayton Hall, South Carolina
Day 10: Wednesday October 23
Charleston houses and museums
Nathanial Russel House
Charleston Museum
St. Michaels Church
Slave Mart Museum
Edmonton Alston House, Charleston
Nathaniel Russel House
Day 11: Thursday October 24
Return from Charleston to Charlotte airport, 211 miles Optional: Continue to MESDA for the Furniture Seminar, Friday and Saturday October 25-27
Regional Furniture Society 
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