What are the similarities and differences between two art professionals? Both have a serious interest in 18th century British art but one is an academic and one gives commercial perspective to the subject. What are the differences between an academic art historian and one that works in a museum? How do auction houses and dealers work together?

Has the populist approach of television and the huge values given to works of art effected our approach? The afternoon discussion will come to no conclusion but it will provide insights into the art world and the way it has changed over the last thirty years.

Miles Wynn Cato is an art dealer of thirty years standing and he opened a gallery in Ludlow in 2013. Hugh Belsey comes from a museum background and he recently published a catalogue raisonné of the Thomas Gainsborough portraits.

Part of the Palmers' Talk and Tea series. Tickets (limited seating): £5 on door (tea and cake included).

Andrew Pike will lead a tour of Shropshire churches. It will include a visit to Myndtown, which has a recently restored and interesting Norman church, with the 3rd oldest bell in the UK! The group will then visit Snailbeach church which has a Mary Webb exhibition and Snailbeach industrial area. In the afternoon we will go to Minsterley to visit to one of the very few 17th‑century churches in Shropshire. Finally we will go to Snead church.

We will leave Smithfield car-park: 10.00 am

And return from Snead for Ludlow at 4pm arriving home at 4.30pm

The cost (coach, coffee, lunch, visit to the mines) will be £20 per head.

Download the booking form HERE

On Friday 10 May, there will be a visit to Fairford church which has the only complete set of late medieval stained glass windows in a parish church in the country. We will have an introduction and time to look at them and other church fittings. Our own stained glass in St Laurence's is in need of conservation and the Fairford windows were last conserved between 1988 and 1999.

After a light lunch at the Bull in Fairford, we will go to Buscot House, near Faringdon, (National Trust, but administered by the Faringdon Trust). See http://www.buscot-park.com. A fine eighteenth-century house, it shows part of the Faringdon Collection of paintings (including Sir Edward Burne-Jones's The Briar Rose series) and other paintings by old masters and modern painters. Harold Peto landscaped the gardens.

We will leave from the Assembly Rooms at 8.15 am prompt and will leave Buscot at closing time, 4.30pm, reaching Ludlow at 7pm.

Bring binoculars, if you have them, for the windows and your National Trust card if you are a member. Booking is now open; the cost includes coach and entrance ticket, coffee at Fairford, a light lunch (but not drinks) at the Bull Hotel, Fairford, but excludes tea at Buscot (where there is a teashop).

Download the booking form HERE

Always popular Ludlow Palmers' Quiz Night. Details to follow but put this date in your diary.

A Ludlow Palmers' afternoon with a talk on wildflowers by Dr Anne Robinson and music by Igor Kennaway and Jane Wynne Owen. Cream teas will be served. Details to be confirmed.

Annual Meeting of the Conservation Trust for St Laurence, Ludlow, followed by Bridget Cherry's talk on ‘Monuments of Shropshire’. Free admission, includes tea and cake.