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Arts & Crafts man William Morris was born in the Lea
Valley village of Walthamstow above the City and just
below Epping Forest. The first thing I read when I visited
the William Morris Gallery was this: Walthamstow has
changed a lot since Morris was born here in 1834. No
kidding! As I’d pulled in to park in the tiny public car park
next to the gallery a grumpy looking man in a white van
blocking the entrance had to reverse out of my way. He
was wearing a high-visibility vest and I took him to be the
parking attendant. As I reached the pay and display
machine the grumpy chap positively exploded from his
van in front of me and started pounding on the windscreen
of a car. Blimey, I thought, it’s only a quid! When a dozen
other police men and women descended in the style of
Starsky & Hutch I cottoned on.
The William Morris Gallery is housed in the artist’s
childhood home, a splendid Georgian manor house but
apparently quite modest compared to the house he’d left
at the age of thirteen with his mother and 8 siblings when
his father died. It was pragmatism rather than penury that
forced the move: the family had been left very well off,
mostly from the proceeds of a Devon copper mine. All his
life Morris was somewhat temperamental, as a child if he
didn’t like his dinner he was apt to throw it out of the
window. As was the fashion for young gentlemen in his
day, Morris was, from a very early age, smitten with all
things mediaeval, spending many a happy day chasing
dragons in Epping Forrest in a miniature suit of armour his
father had bought him. It is said that his lifelong love of
tapestries came from those hanging at Queen Elizabeth’s
Hunting Lodge in the forest.
William Morris in East London
Morris went up to Oxford with the intention of taking holy
orders but, meeting Edward Burne Jones and other artistic
young men, decided to become an architect instead.
Ultimately Morris would become a designer, craftsman,
writer, retailer, and political activist. He is most widely
known for his wallpaper designs. He did not return to
Walthamstow after university, living for five years at the
Red House in Bexleyheath before running out of cash
after which he moved into his workshops in Bloomsbury
and for the last 25 years of his life he rented beautiful
Kelmscott Manor on the Thames in Oxfordshire as his
country
retreat.
When he died at Kelmscott, aged just 62,
his doctor’s diagnosis was that: “The disease is simply
being William Morris, and having done more work than
most ten men.” It was
kidney failure actually
but we get the point.
Morris was buried in
Kelmscott churchyard.
First opened by Clem
Atlee in 1950 the
William Morris Gallery
nearly closed in 2007 as
a consequence of budget
restraints at the London
Borough of Waltham but
a spirited local campaign
led to an £80,000 grant,
which snowballed into