Join Bath Assembly Room curators, Tatjana LeBoff and Emily Roy, online for a talk which will reveal the fascinating story of Bath Assembly Rooms, from their glittering eighteenth-century heyday as a venue which hosted Jane Austen, through the many challenges they have faced across the centuries. In preparation our curators have conducted extensive research into the lives of Georgians in Bath from all walks of life, uncovering stories to be shared. Join them as they unveil the changing fortunes of the building, shedding light on the fascinating group of people who first funded its construction, and go on to explore how the Rooms have survived fire and war, as well as shifting fashions to remain one of Bath’s most iconic landmarks. And then what about its twenty-first century future? This talk will provide the ‘inside track’ on the current project to restore the building.

Tatjana LeBoff is a Project Curator for the Bath Assembly Rooms (National Trust), having previously worked for the National Trust at Petworth House, as well as holding contemporary curatorial positions at the Barbican, London, and Pembroke College, Oxford. Having received a BA in History of Art and an MA in Architectural History from UCL she has developed her curatorial skills through research and hands-on experiences. Her interests lie in the interplay between art, design, fashion, architecture, society, food, and the lived environment, exploring how social and individual identities are constructed, conveyed, and reformed. With a focus on how complex concepts can be communicated to a wide audience through curation, dynamic displays, diverse narratives, participatory activity and multidisciplinary collaboration, the experiential and emotive value of art and heritage is paramount to her curatorial practice. She holds expertise in the social history of the long eighteenth-century, alongside that of curating contemporary and site-specific art. She seeks to combine these two areas of experience to create new ways of sharing history with a wider public. Additionally, she is a co-editor on the publication Bath and Beyond: The Social and Cultural World of the Georgian Assembly Room, published by Routledge as part of their Studies in Eighteenth-Century Cultures and Societies series in 2025.

Emily Roy, research includes how health, wellness and disability in Georgian Bath intersected with leisure and entertainment. Emily is leading on the historical basis of the narrative content within the experience and the creation of new displays of historic objects, including loans from other National Trust properties, local Bath collections and UK museums. Before this role, Emily was Project Curator for Applied Arts at Bristol Museums, working with collections including textiles, metalwork, ceramics and glass. She completed her PhD in 2022, which was a Collaborative Doctoral Award between the University of Cambridge and the Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford. Her thesis titled ‘City of Stone: The Materiality of St Petersburg in Print, c.1703-1830’ explored print culture and urban development in long-18th-century Russia. Before beginning her PhD, Emily was Curator at Waddesdon Manor (National Trust, Rothschild Collections), with a special focus on furniture and decorative arts. She has also completed research and cataloguing projects at the Ashmolean Museum and British Library.

Tickets: Free for members and non-members, registration is required