Wednesday 16th September 2026 7.30pm
Dr Alwyn Turner University of Chichester
The Lambeth Walk: Why Britain avoided political extremism in the 1920s and 1930s
Dr Alywn W. Turner of Chichester University is a highly successful social and cultural historian of modern Britain. His books have charted the decades of 20th century Britain; Crisis What Crisis? Britain in the 1970s, Rejoice! Rejoice! Britain in the 1980s and A classless society: Britain in the 1990s. His latest book; A shell shocked nation looks at the interwar years of the 20th Century . This lecture looks at a highly relevant question in the 2020s, how the Britain of 1920s and ‘30s avoided the political extremism that engulfed much of mainland Europe.
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Wednesday 14th October 2026 7.30 pm
Professor Evelyn Welch. Vice Chancellor University of Bristol
Why did men wear wigs in 17th century Europe
Professor Evelyn Welch MBE 14th Vice Chancellor of Bristol University is also an American scholar of the Renaissance and Early Modern Period. Author of Renaissance Skin (2025)
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Wednesday 11th November 2026. 7.30 pm
Professor Ronald Hutton University of Bristol
Oliver Cromwell
Professor Ronald Hutton author of a magnificent three volume biography of Cromwell shares his insights on this exceptional and controversial ruler of Britain.
‘Hutton’s life of Cromwell… a monumental achievement – the first in the great battalion of Cromwellian biographies to escape the long shadow cast by the Carlylean figure standing outside Westminster Hall.’ John Adamson.
The Bristol HA’s patron returns to give another stimulating lecture.
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Wednesday 18th or 25th November 2026. TBC
Bristol Historical Association
Bristol Schools Sixth Form Great Debate
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Wednesday 9th December 2026. 7.30pm
Dr Amy King. University of Bristol
The afterlife of a fascist murder: Giacomo Matteotti in Myth and Memory
Dr Amy King of Bristol University talks about the subject of her recently published book The Afterlife of a Fascist Murder: Giacomo Matteotti in Myth and Memory, 1924-2024. Her research focuses on oral history and antifascism.
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Wednesday 20th January 2027. 7.00 pm.
Annual pub quiz
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Wednesday 27th January 2027 7.30pm
Andrew Foyle
More of Bristol’s Distinctive Buildings
Andrew Foyle, author of the Pevsner City Guide to Bristol (2004), and rewriter of the Buildings of England volume Somerset North and Bristol (2011).
Andrew is a buildings historian and social historian. He returns by popular demand to highlight more of Bristol’s unique built heritage. Last year Andrew went through some of the amazing buildings of Bristol and what it told us about our city’s history but there was not enough time to cover the more recent buildings so we have asked him back to highlight some more 19th and 20th century buildings.
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Wednesday 3rd February 2027 7.30 pm
Professor Matt Worley. University of Reading
No future: Punk, Politics and British Youth Culture 1976-1984
The years 1976–84 saw punk emerge and evolve as a fashion, a musical form, an attitude and an aesthetic. Against a backdrop of social fragmentation, violence, high unemployment and socio-economic change, punk rejuvenated and re-energised British youth culture. Matt Worley examines the view that youth culture is more than just consumerism. Did punk offer a platform for young people to challenge the world around them and to express themselves and their ideas.
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Wednesday 10th March 2027. 7.30pm
Professor Emma Griffin. Queen Mary University of London
The British Industrial Revolution and the Making of the Modern World
Professor Emma Griffin of QMUL is a widely published historian of modern Britain, particularly known for her work on the lives of ordinary people in Britain during the Industrial Revolution. This talk will look at historians’ long fascination with the emergence of modernity. It will ask why the West, Britain in particular, underwent a transition to modern economic growth around the end of the eighteenth century. Using comparative evidence from Britain, France and the US, and with a particular focus on workers, this talk will shed new light on the role of culture in the rise of the modern industrialised world.
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Wednesday 24th March 2027. Daytime
Led by Professor Brian Ward University of Northumbria
Black Civil Rights Conference for Sixth formers
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Sunday 21st April 2027. 7.30pm
Professor Steven Gunn. Merton College University of Oxford
Who did Henry VIII think he was?
Steven Gunn is author of numerous books on the early modern period including An Accidental History of Tudor England: From Daily Life to Sudden Death (with Tomasz Gromelski), The English People at War in the Age of Henry VIII (2018). He regularly gives lectures to HA branches. Professor Gunn returns to that most memorable of monarchs about whom we know more than any other king of England. There are more portraits, painted, drawn and sculpted. We have more ambassadors reports and we have even found his football boots but who did he think he was?
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Wednesday 5th May 2027. 7.30pm
Professor Caroline Pennock University of Sheffield
How Indigenous American discovered Europe
Professor Caroline Dodds Pennock of Sheffield University author of on Savage Shores (2023) has uncovered the marginalised figures in the traditional story of Europe’s exploration of the ‘New World’ complicating familiar narratives of “exploration” and “discovery”. She introduces the Brazilians who met Henry VIII and the Inuit man who was brought to late 16th-century Bristol and hunted ducks on the River Avon. In addition the thousands of others who arrived as intermediaries and translators, diplomats and servants.
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Wednesday 16th June 2027. TBC
Historical Pizza Quiz for Sixth formers
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