In 1910 E.M. Foster, in his novel Howards End wrote: ‘If one wanted to show a foreigner England, perhaps the wisest course would be to take him to the final section of the Purbeck Hills, and stand him on their summit a few miles to the east of Corfe. Then system after system of our […]
Our visit to Standen will be a trip down memory lane for me and an experience I look forward to sharing with you. Apart from the Beale family who bought the property and commissioned Philip Webb to design and build the house, there are two people, Arthur and Helen Grogan, who are almost as important […]
There is hope in honest error, none in the icy perfection of the mere stylist. * The Arts and Crafts Movement did not spring into being fully fledged, the result of some remarkable clap of thunder, the scales falling miraculously from the eyes of previously blind architects and designers. It emerged gradually in England during […]
Sculptors played a major role in forwarding the aims of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Hamo Thornycroft, George Frampton and Onslow Ford were among the founding members of the Art Workers Guild, with others including F.W. Pomeroy, William Reynolds-Stephens, Alfred Gilbert, Stirling Lee and Harry Bates being elected in the first few years of the […]
This is a year of centenaries and celebrations. Any of you lucky enough to be in London before 22nd April should head straight for Two Temple Place, that extraordinary Gothic mansion beside the Thames, just along from the Savoy Hotel.
This is a year of centenaries and celebrations. Any of you lucky enough to be in London before 22nd April should head straight for Two Temple Place, that extraordinary Gothic mansion beside the Thames, just along from the Savoy Hotel.
The Arts and Crafts Movement was a deeply serious philosophical, practical and committed response to the industrialization of England, its ‘green and pleasant land’ in danger of being blackened by the ever burgeoning factories and the movement of the rural population to the sprawling, insanitary slums surrounding the industrial cities, epitomized by Charles Dickens’s Coketown […]
Fiona MacCarthy in William Morris: A Life for Our Time, describes Morris recalling nostalgically the poplar meadows and little villages of the Somme as well as the long straight roads of Picardy seemingly stretching into eternity: “Those long straight roads of Northern France”, she wrote, “remained in Morris’s mind as they would remain in the […]
Early last month Elaine and I did a preliminary reconnaissance for next June’s Normandy and Picardy tour. Starting in Chartres we followed William Morris’s route through Dreux, Evreux and Louviers to Rouen, revelling in those great gothic cathedrals which inspired not only Morris, but also Pugin, William Burges and others. Morris described the journey that […]
As summer advances and turns into autumn a wide and impressive variety of tributes are being paid this year to the ten million soldiers who died during the First World War. The 8th of August marked the centenary of the Battle of Amiens, which, although not decisive in itself, is seen in the light of history as marking the beginning of the end of that war.
