An international organisation for all those interested in lesser traditional buildings

Conferences

The Group's conferences are where members meet to study buildings and discuss their findings. Conferences are open to all members.

Saeters and Stave Churches

Proposed Vernacular Architecture Group tour to Norway: Thursday 16 to Sunday 26 June 2011

The group is organising a tour to Norway to visit some of its notable timber buildings - and also see something of the scenery and the country. At this stage, we have a draft itinerary and enough people have expressed an interest for us to proceed with the detailed planning. We will be pleased, however, to receive the names of others who may be interested in coming and would like to be kept informed. Further details are available by clicking on the link above - if you think you may be interested (whether you are a VAG member or not), please let us know by responding as requested on the form.

Spring Conferences

In the spring we meet in a different part of the country each year to visit a selection of buildings in the local vernacular tradition. Local experts are on hand to explain the background and more experienced members help others to interpret them. In the evenings, lectures and discussions allow the day's findings to be explored further.

Somerset conference 2006

Recent spring conference venues:

Future spring conferences include:

Spring Conference Bursaries
Bursaries are offered each year to enable a registered student or a professional in the early years of his or her career to attend the spring conference. Details on how to apply for a bursary for the next Spring Conference will be published here in due course.

Winter Conferences

The winter conference takes a theme of current interest and explores it in depth through papers given by experts in the field.

Recent winter conference themes include:

Winter Conference 2010: Service Rooms, Servants' Chambers, and Storage
This year it has been impossible to reserve accommodation for a weekend before Christmas and it was therefore decided to hold the 2010 Winter Conference after Christmas on 8-9 January 2011. The theme for the conference will be Service Rooms, Servants' Chambers, and Storage. The VAG has given considerable attention to halls and chambers as components of medieval houses, but the origins of the standard suite of service rooms has received little thought. Moreover, despite extensive work by historians on probate inventories in the last thirty years, they have given little attention to the functions of rooms since Maurice Barley drew attention to the expansion of service rooms in early modern England, to the proliferation of chambers and in-house storage, and to the problems of determining what rooms and functions were in the house and what were detached or semi-detached from it. There has also been little systematic focus on the accommodation of non-family members of the household, or on services in the tower houses of Ireland, or the tall, flatted town buildings of Scotland. This conference will address these topics, with a chronological span from the High Middle Ages to the early 19th century, and wide regional coverage inside England, as well as talks on Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The conference will be held at the John Foster Hall/Gilbert Murray Conference Centre, University of Leicester.

Winter Conference Bursaries
Bursaries are offered each year to enable a registered student or a professional in the early years of his or her career to attend the winter conference. Details on how to apply for a bursary for the next winter conference will be published here in due course.

Oxford Weekend Schools

The Group contributes to an annual weekend school held in Oxford and run by the Oxford University Department of Continuing Education. It is open to the public and topics have included:

The next weekend school, on the topic of Medieval Domestic Cultures, will be held on 24-26 September 2010. Full details are available on the OUDCE web pages.

Tip: if all the residential places on the weekend school are already taken, you may be able to find alternative student accommodation in Oxford at various prices via budgetstayuk.

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