The beliefs embodied in his love for Kelmscott Manor – his socialism and care for the environment – are as urgent now as they were in the late 19th century
“I am writing among the gables and rook-haunted trees, with a sense of the place being almost too beautiful to live in,” wrote William Morris in 1872, the year after he co-signed the lease on Kelmscott Manor in Oxfordshire, which next week reopens to the public after a three-year, multimillion-pound refurbishment. Anyone who has seen designs by Morris will have seen motifs inspired by Kelmscott: Strawberry Thief, for instance, or Willow Bough.
Morris, as his biographer Fiona MacCarthy put it, “had a sense of place so acute as to be almost a disability”; physical surroundings were so foundational to his thinking that MacCarthy listed locations as primary sources. Kelmscott, in particular, was central to his most deeply held beliefs – beliefs that were not only influential then, but are arguably even more important now.
