Pepe Martinez

Pepe qualified as a London blue badge tourist guide in 2011, graduating at the top of his class. Since qualifying as a guide he has specialised in the graffiti and street art of East London. Prior to becoming a London blue badge, Pepe was a tour manager for 15 years, travelling extensively, all over the world.

Pepe can organise and arrange lecture facilities in central London. He can also combine a lecture with a walk of street art and graffiti in the East End and Pepe can also organise a practical spray session, giving your group an opportunity to have a go at creating their own works.

Jamie Hayes

Jamie is a theatre director, specialising in opera. After training at RADA, he worked for Kent Opera, Glyndebourne Festival and Touring Opera, the BBC and English National Opera. He has directed many new opera productions in the UK whilst his new opera productions overseas have premiered in Reykjavik, Malta and Melbourne. Jamie was Associate Director on the original production of the hit musical Miss Saigon in the West End and on Broadway. He has directed many productions at leading conservatoires, including the Royal Academy of Music, the Royal College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Jamie was Director of Productions for Clonter Opera in Cheshire. His La Traviata was awarded The Manchester Evening News Award for Best Opera in 2006 and his Don Giovanni of the following year received a nomination. His productions range from Mozart and Rossini via Verdi and Bizet to Gilbert and Sullivan and Britten. Jamie was Director of Productions for British Youth Opera for over a decade, a company devoted to promoting the talents of our finest young opera singers in the UK. Jamie lives in Buckinghamshire and is married to the mezzo-soprano Jean Rigby. They have three children.

Amy Lim

Duncan Pring

Jonathon Conlin

Dr Jonathan Conlin is a cultural historian of modern Britain and Professor of Modern History at the University of Southampton. His books include Tales of Two Cities (2014), a comparative history of Paris and London, and biographies of Adam Smith and the Anglo-Armenian oil baron Calouste Gulbenkian. Born in New York, he studied History and Modern Languages at Oxford, subsequently moving to the Courtauld Institute and Cambridge for his MA and PhD. In 2023 he was commissioned by the National Gallery to write its official bicentenary history.

Lucy Hughes-Hallett

Lucy Hughes-Hallett is a cultural historian and biographer. Her book on the Duke of Buckingham will be published in 2024 by Fourth Estate.

Her previous biography, The Pike: Gabriele d’Annunzio, was described in The Sunday Times as ‘the biography of the decade’. It won all three of the UK’s most prestigious prizes for non-fiction – the Samuel Johns7on Prize, the Duff Cooper Prize and the Costa Biography Award. Her other non-fiction books include Cleopatra and Heroes.

She also writes fiction. Her novel, Peculiar Ground, is largely set in the 17th century, and narrated by a landscape designer loosely based on the great diarist John Evelyn. It was described as ‘almost Tolstoyan in its sly wit and descriptive brilliance’ (The Guardian) and ‘full of drama, vivid characters, wit, gorgeous writing and fascinating detail’. (New York Times).  In her short story collection, Fabulous, she retells fables from classical mythology, relocating them to modern Britain.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and of the Historical Association, she has written on books, theatre and the visual arts for publications including The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Observer, The New Statesman and the TLS. She was Chair of the Judges for the 2021 International Booker Prize.

Caroline Levisse

Dr Caroline Levisse is an art historian based in London. She was born in France where she studied art history before moving to Copenhagen. In Denmark, she focused on research work and completed a PhD on the relations between art and religion in contemporary Scandinavian art. After graduating in 2013, she moved to London and started teaching art history with adult education providers. She has since developed a range of courses focusing on 19th and early 20th century Western art. She has published articles in French and English in academic journals as well as magazines and newspapers, such as Church Times and Arts Sacres.

Tobias Capwell

Toby is Curator of Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection in London and an internationally-acknowledged authority on Medieval and Renaissance weapons. He is the author of numerous books on the subject of arms and armour, including Masterpieces of European Arms and Armour at the Wallace Collection (2011; Apollo Magazine Book of the Year 2012); The Noble Art of the Sword: Fashion and Fencing in Renaissance Europe 1520-1630, ex. cat. (2012); Armour of the English Knight 1400-1450 (2015; Military History Monthly Illustrated Book of the Year 2017); ans most recently Arms and Armour of the Medieval Joust(2018). Toby also appears regularly on television, most recently on A Stitch in Time (2018; BBC4); as presenter and armour advisor on Richard III: The New Evidence (2014; C4), and as the writer and presenter of Metalworks: The Knight’s Tale (2012; BBC4). In 2015 Toby had the unusual honour of serving as one of the two fully armoured horsemen escorting the remains of King Richard III, from the battlefield at Bosworth to their final resting place in Leicester Cathedral.

Roger Mendham

A keen and accomplished photographer Roger has gained Distinctions from the Royal Photographic Society  and is currently the President of the Surrey Photographic Association.

His artistic taste is predominantly 20th century, and he is particularly interested in the visual aspects of art.

His photography concentrates on shapes, textures and colours and he has studied the history of photography from its earliest developments in the early 1830s to becoming a major art form in the late 20th and now 21st centuries.

An experienced public speaker, his talks are all richly illustrated and this talk incudes the background to some of the greatest photographs ever taken.

Sian Walters

Siân Walters is an art historian and the director of Art History in Focus. She has been a lecturer at the National Gallery for 20 years and taught their first online course, Stories of Art, in September 2020. She also lectures for The Wallace Collection, The Art Fund and many art societies and colleges throughout Europe, and taught at Surrey University for many years.

Her specialist areas include 15th and 16th century Italian Art, Spanish Art and Architecture, Dutch and Flemish painting and the relationship between Dance and Art (she is an honorary advisor to the Nonsuch Historical Dance Society). Siân studied at Cambridge University where she was awarded a choral exhibition and a 1st for her dissertation on the paintings of Arnold Schoenberg. She has lived in France and Italy where she worked for the eminent Haydn scholar H.C. Robbins Landon and for the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice. She spends much of the year organising and leading specialist art tours abroad, including bespoke trips for The Arts Society.

In recent years Siân has been asked to represent the National Gallery at the international Hay Festival and was named a Highly Commended finalist in the World’s Best Guide Awards. In 2018 she was invited to be the guest lecturer on the inaugural BRAVO Cruise of Performing Arts alongside Katherine Jenkins, Julian Lloyd Webber and Ruthie Henshall. In 2020 Siân presented the first online courses for both The Wallace Collection and The National Gallery, and was one of the first accredited lecturers to provide online Zoom lectures.

In November she launched a series of live, online tours and visits abroad entitled Cultural Travels from Home. These include visits by special arrangement to a number of major European art galleries allowing virtual access to their collections. These are being offered to Arts Society groups as part of their online tours/events programme, please get in touch for more details.

Arts Society groups as part of their online tours/events programme, please get in touch for more details.