Folkestone Room

The Folkestone Room is named after Jacob Bouverie, 1st Viscount Folkestone (born 1694 – died 1761)

The Society used this room as a small exhibition space, later as a meeting room, and then as a hospitality facility. The RSA Journal records the naming of the Folkestone Room in 1990 as a “new addition to the conference facilities.”

Jacob Bouverie was the son of a merchant who made his fortune trading in the eastern Mediterranean. Bouverie received the lordships of Folkestone and Terlingham from his uncle in 1722, and in 1736 succeeded his elder brother as the third baronet Bouverie. He became a trustee of the colony of Georgia in 1737 and was MP for Salisbury from 1741-1747 as a Tory. He was a guardian of the Foundling Hospital from 1745 and created the first Viscount Folkestone and Baron Longford in 1747.

In 1754, with his brother-in-law Lord Romney, Lord Folkestone was a founder-member of the Society of Arts. He chaired its first meeting and guaranteed its finances until it was secure. On 5 February 1755, he was elected the Society’s first president, an office he held until he died in 1761. Folkestone and Romney also helped found the Marine Society in 1756.

Bouverie became a trustee of the colony of Georgia in 1737 when he donated £1,000. The sum had been left by his father and elder brother to free English people enslaved by North African corsairs, but the British consulates in Morocco and Fez informed him that there were no such slaves to free. Bouverie thus gave the sum to Georgia, a colony where slavery was prohibited – the first territory in America to do so. In 1751, however, the trustees lifted the prohibition.