Charles Saumarez Smith – John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture

A special Literature Festival event to mark the tercentenary of the great architect’s death

Sir John Vanbrugh was one of Britain’s greatest architects and the designer of some of the most important and best beloved English country houses, including Castle Howard and Blenheim Palace. By the standards of architects of the time, Vanbrugh was a worldly figure, friend and ally of the great, with a strong sense of the imaginative characteristics of architecture, its power of evocation, and a building’s emotional impact, particularly when compared to the more disciplined and scholarly work of his contemporaries, Wren and Hawksmoor. Charles Saumarez Smith paints a fascinating portrait of a man whose architecture was shaped by his personality, exploring Vanbrugh’s activities as a playwright and theatre manager, his circle of friends, his place in 18th-century society, and, his influence on later architects from Robert Adam to Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown.

Charles Saumarez Smith did a PhD. on ‘Charles Howard, third Earl of Carlisle and the Architecture of Castle Howard’ at the Warburg Institute.  His first book, The Building of Castle Howard, was published by Faber and Faber in 1990 and won the Alice David Hitchcock Medallion.  After a career working in museums and galleries, he retired in 2018, since which he has returned to writing about architecture as the architecture critic of The Critic.  His book, John Vanbrugh: The Drama of Architecture was published by Lund Humphries in November and an exhibition of the same title will open in February 2026 at Sir John Soane’s Museum.

Charles will be in conversation with Lichfield’s very own Annette Rubery, an academic, theatre historian, editor and author with a special interest in Vanbrugh and his circle.