Talk - From Birmingham to Byzantium to the Cotswolds

The furniture maker who spent three years mapping Byzantium's ruined churches

Sidney Barnsley left the Cotswold workshop he shared with his brother Ernest and Ernest Gimson for a very different apprenticeship: three years travelling through Greece and Turkey with the architect Robert Weir Schultz, recording roughly fifty Byzantine churches by hand, drawing and photographing buildings that in some cases no longer survive. Kirsty Hartsiotis, formerly curator of decorative and fine art at The Wilson in Cheltenham and now a curator at Swindon Museums, traces that unlikely detour and where it led.

The talk marks the centenary of the deaths of Ernest and Sidney Barnsley, the Birmingham-born brothers who became two of the defining names of Cotswold Arts and Crafts. It follows Ernest to France and Italy and Sidney to the Byzantine survey that produced a monograph on the monastery of Hosios Loukas, before both settled with Gimson in Sapperton to build the workshops that made their reputations: Ernest's Rodmarton Manor, still rising by hand-tool methods when he died and finished by his son-in-law Norman Jewson, and Sidney's Painswick almshouses and furniture. Hartsiotis, who curated the Wilson's Ernest Gimson exhibition and lectures for the Arts Society, also covers who the brothers drank with in the village and what came after them through Sidney's children Grace and Edward.

It's a rare chance to hear the Byzantine chapter of Cotswold Arts and Crafts history from a specialist who has spent years inside the archives.

Thursday 17 September 2026 · Corinium Museum, Park Street, Cirencester, Gloucestershire GL7 2BX · Starts 7pm