‘Enter and Be Happy’ - Kelmscott Manor

The Historic House Foundation is helping to fund essential repairs to the roof of Kelmscott Manor in Gloucestershire at the start of a major programme of restoration which will continue until 2022.

An Irreplaceable Place

There are not many buildings in Britain that have had as strong an impact on British artistic life as Kelmscott Manor.  Will Gompertz, the BBC’s Arts Editor, has just chosen it as one of Historic England’s 100 Irreplaceable Places.

Home of Arts & Crafts

Kelmscott was the country retreat of William Morris, designer, socialist, conservationist, writer and leading light of the Arts & Crafts movement.  Morris took a joint lease with his friend the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1871. While Morris was to take inspiration from the house’s rural setting and the flora and fauna of the countryside around, Rossetti’s inspiration came from Morris’ wife, Jane, with whom he was having an affair.  When Morris travelled to Iceland, he left Rosetti and Jane to organise and decorate the house so that Jane became the inspiration and model for some of Rossetti’s most celebrated paintings.

Legacy

Morris’s daughter May continued to live at Kelmscott Manor after her father’s death and became a celebrity in her own right.  From her mother, she inherited a talent for needlework and was an influential embroiderer and designer, founding the Women’s Guild of Arts in 1907.  It was she who curated the interiors of the house as her parents had left them. After her death, Kelmscott Manor was preserved by first Oxford University and now, the Society of Antiquaries for public enjoyment.

 ‘Heaven on Earth’

Kelmscott Manor was built about 1570 from local limestone and, with its secluded gardens, is highly evocative of an England that Morris felt was disappearing in the face of industrial progress. It fitted perfectly with his ideas on the importance of traditional craft and the influence of nature. The interiors have changed little since Morris’s time and still retain many of his wallpapers, textiles and furniture.  Rossetti also contributed his taste to the interiors and there are furnishings designed by many of the key figures of the Arts and Crafts movement. The house is undergoing a major programme to restore the building and to create spaces for workshops and an artist-in-residence programme. The Historic Houses Foundation are contributing to vital work to repair the roof under whose ancient timbers, in Morris’ words, “the tillers and herdsmen slept" in attics that are still atmospheric today.