5x15: Five Leading Thinkers on the Unique Magic of Venice
with
Stephen Bayley
Sara Wheeler
Martin Gayford
Two further speakers to be announced soon…
Tuesday 15 September 2026
5 x 15 minute Lectures: 7pm – 9pm
Tickets £40
At Royal Geographical Society
1 Kensington Gore
London SW7 2AR
Five leading cultural figures each deliver a fifteen-minute talk exploring Venice through art, literature, history and design.
For centuries, Venice has occupied a unique place in the British imagination. From Turner and Ruskin to Byron, James and Jan Morris, generations of British writers, artists and travellers have fallen under the spell of the floating city, with all its beauty, melancholy, glamour and decay.
In this Venice-themed 5×15, leading writers and cultural figures each deliver a fifteen-minute talk exploring a different facet of Venice through art, literature, history and design.
Stephen Bayley (with Terence Conran) created London’s influential Design Museum. Over nearly fifty years his books, journalism and exhibitions have changed the popular understanding of ‘design.’ His next book is a memoir, Analogue Epilogue: In Search of Lost Things. He is Chairman of The Royal Fine Art Commission Trust.
Sara Wheeler is an award-winning and internationally bestselling travel writer and biographer, and a regular broadcaster on BBC Radio; like Jan Morris, she has spent half her working life on the road. Her eleven books include Terra Incognita: Travels in Antarctica and Cherry: A Life of Apsley Cherry-Garrard . She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a contributing editor of the Literary Review. Her latest book is the highly acclaimed Jan Morris: A Life.
Martin Gayford is an art critic, writer and curator. He is the author of Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud, A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney, How Painting Happens (and why it matters), Venice: City of Pictures and Love Lucian: The Letters of Lucian Freud, 1939 –1954, and acclaimed books on Van Gogh, Constable and Michaelangelo. His latest book, with Tracey Emin, is My Heart is This: Tracey Emin on Painting.
This is a joint event with 5×15
This event supports the Acqua Granda Appeal, commemorating the 60th Anniversary of the devasting 1966 floods
