DISCOVERY DAYS
Discovery Days are held at Moor Park Mansion and include tea/coffee and a light lunch within the ticket price. Each day includes two one-hour lectures before lunch and one lecture after lunch. Registration is from 10.00. The first lecture begins at 10.30 and the afternoon lecture ends typically at 3.15pm. Please explore the list below and click the links for full details of each Discovery Day and to download the flyer/booking form. Members may book online.
Members have priority for all our bookable events. However, non-members are welcome to express an interest in attending a specific event by contacting the Event Organiser (contact details are on the relevant flyer). Should places still be available, they may at the discretion of the Event Organiser be made available to non-members or members of other Arts Societies, in order of application date.
The Surprising Success Story of Opera in London
6 November 2026 at 10:30:00
Booking closes
23 October 2026
The Royal Opera House, Covent Garden
Speaker:
Sarah Lenton
London, 24 February 1711, and a new art form has erupted at the King’s Theatre Haymarket - chariots drawn by dragons, mountains splitting upstage, fountains, and real birds flitting round the auditorium. Is it a panto? No! It’s Handel’s opera Rinaldo.
In today’s Discovery Day we will hear how from then on, through thick and thin, London’s historic theatres have contributed to the continuing success of this most improbable art form.
Our Three Greatest English Novelists
8 April 2027 at 09:30:00
Booking closes
25 March 2027
L-R: Agatha Christie, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen
Speaker:
Jane Tapley
In this Discovery Day our Speaker Jane Tapley will explore for us the lives and careers of three writers, from the Regency era to the 20th century, who are, she will argue, in their own unique ways unquestionably our three greatest English novelists: Jane Austen, Charles Dickens and Agatha Christie. Join us today to hear a rattling good yarn!
Toulouse-Lautrec and Bohemian Paris
3 June 2027 at 09:30:00
Booking closes
20 May 2027
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec: Marcelle Lender Dancing the Bolero in “Chilpéric”, oil on canvas 1895-6
Speaker:
Martin Heard
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec is one of the most popular French painters of the late 19th century. It is his art that illustrates and epitomises the compelling image and 'Bohemian' lifestyle of the Belle Époque period of 1890s Paris.
Today’s Discovery Day takes us to the Montmartre that he knew, to meet the characters that people his art and sample the atmosphere and the excitement of fin-de-siècle Paris, the world’s capital of entertainment as depicted and documented by Lautrec and his contemporaries. And we will uncover the life, the rise to fame and the legacy of the artist who is, above all others, indelibly associated with the Parisian vie de Bohème.