Swimming Pools in the Garden: A Symposium at Buscot Park

Dr George Townsend is a writer and teacher with an interest in the history of bathing culture. His PhD was a history of Parson’s Pleasure, a men’s bathing place on the River Cherwell in Oxford active between c. 1600 and 1992. He has curated exhibitions on the wider history of river swimming in Oxford, and on the wood engravings of contemporary printmaker Duncan Montgomery.

Dr Kate Hext is associate professor in English literature at the University of Exeter. Her books include Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and the American Movies (2024) and a new edition of Oscar Wilde’s plays (2025). She is currently writing a book about Great Ambrook’s lost early-twentieth century garden, in South Devon.

Dr Catherine Horwood is a cultural historian with a particular interest in early 20th-century dress codes. Her publications include Keeping Up Appearances: Fashion and Class Between the Wars (The History Press).

Dr Amy Lim is Curator of the Faringdon Collection at Buscot Park, Oxfordshire and Brompton Square, London. She’s an Accredited Lecturer for the Arts Society, a Departmental Tutor at Oxford Lifelong Learning (formerly the Oxford University Department for Continuing Education) and a volunteer Curator at the Stanley Spencer Gallery, Cookham, where she is lead curator for the current exhibition ‘Love & Landscape: Stanley Spencer in Suffolk’, held in partnership with Gainsborough’s House, Sudbury. Amy completed doctoral thesis on late Stuart aristocratic art patronage in 2022 at the University of Oxford in a Collaborative Doctoral Partnership with Tate, where she was also research curator for the exhibitions ‘British Baroque: Power and Illusion’ (2020) and ‘Now You See Us: Women Artists in Britain, 1520-1920’ (2024). She is a Council member of the Furniture History Society, and Co-chair of its Events Committee.

Christopher is an architectural historian and a swimmer, who has recently swum 100 kilometres in Greece to raise funds for the new public garden of Lambeth Green. He reviews swimming pools for Country Life, the Telegraph and the Financial Times.