Why the world went mad for William Morris

Telegraph

30-03-2025

On Gogglebox, Mary and Giles have been sitting for the past 10 years in front of the same bit of Willow Bough wallpaper. It must by now be the nation's most famous piece of William Morris design, and for good measure, Mary's armchair is upholstered in the same pattern.
So I asked her why she had ­chosen it. Some years ago she was writing about the homes of 'top ­tastebrokers' (such as Amabel Lindsay, Christopher Gibbs and Nicky Haslam). 'The one thing they had in common was that each had at least one room papered in ­William Morris Willow pattern.'
The staying power of designs by William Morris, who lived from 1834 to 1896, is extraordinary. 'He's never been as popular as today,' says Hadrian Garrard, the director since 2021 of the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east ­London, which is mounting an exhibition entitled Morris Mania. 'His work is undergoing another resurgence just now and we're ­trying to find out exactly why.'
The gallery has invited people to get in touch with photographs of Morris designs in their family ­history – on a tablecloth at a birthday party or a sofa at Christmas. We talked in Garrard's office at the gallery, high in the attic of the house where Morris lived in his teenage years after his father died suddenly. By an irony its Georgian reticence is not at all the kind of architecture that Morris liked.
Morris got his lifelong friend Philip Webb to build him the ­wonderful Red House at Bexleyheath – with its steep roofs of ­hand-made tiles, and windows set asymmetrically in the red brick walls. It is now in the care of the National Trust. Morris wanted Red House to be a home from 1860 for his wife Janey and their daughters and for friends such as Ned Burne-Jones and his wife Georgiana. But Morris's idyll was to be marred by Dante Gabriel ­Rossetti stealing Janey's affections, if they had ever been won by ­Morris in the first place.
Morris came to make designs of great exactitude (from images in his memory, not from specimens beside him). He was not following a fashion, so never went out of ­fashion. Unlike the earlier Gothic of Pugin or later Art Nouveau you ­cannot pin Morris's designs down to a decade or so of English sensibility, as you might the drawings of his fellow socialist Walter Crane. Could you even identify a pattern like Bird and Anemone, designed in 1881, as English? In any case a Morris ­cushion fits in a cottage or a palace in Walthamstow or Wonju.
However perfect his designs, Morris had something clumsy about his body. Aged 24, on the way to a rowing trip down the Seine with Philip Webb and another friend from Oxford, Charles Faulkner, Morris was up the tower of Amiens Cathedral when he snagged the satchel in which he was carrying gold sovereigns. Webb had to stop the little coins with his foot from showering out of a gargoyle.
Burne-Jones often drew comical sketches of Morris's increasingly portly frame intent on wood engraving, weaving at a loom, working at a tapestry or peering into a cauldron. These seem meant in a friendly way, but Garrard is not always so sure. 'I do think there was an element of bullying in the way Morris was sometimes treated, certainly by Rossetti,' he says. Rossetti, who even caricatured his saintly sister Christina in a tantrum, breaking china and furniture, would deliberately provoke Morris into one of the celebrated rages that characterised the first half of his life.
But Morris was the man who took responsibility, who put money into the design company that became Morris & Co, who nursed it and even served customers in its shop. 'I do like William Morris as a man,' Garrard says. 'He was a good father and a good friend.' ­Perhaps that is one reason that admirers still welcome his designs into their homes.
A prize exhibit is an embroidery by May Morris of verses by her father:
The wind's on the wold
And the night is a-cold,
And Thames runs chill
'Twixt mead and hill.
But kind and dear
Is the old house here
And my heart is warm
Midst winter's harm.
She worked the embroidery on the pelmet for a grand bed-hanging while she sat with Morris as he lay sick and approaching death.
After five years at Red House, Morris had sold it amid money ­worries, and moved to Queen Square, Bloomsbury, to live above the shop displaying the wares of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. Movement was constant in Morris's life. He was a restless workaholic, always on the boil. In that he resembled the godfather of Gothic, A W N Pugin, who died aged 40. It was surprising that ­Morris made it to 62.
In the 1890s Burne-Jones looked back on Morris's enthusiasms in an affectionate catalogue of how he first resolved to be a monk, then an architect, after that a painter, but had given painting up to be a poet, then a designer of pretty curtains, had then learnt dyeing, weaving and tapestry-making and then wanted to smash up everything and begin the world anew, at last turning to printing fine books. 'Then he'll do I don't know what, but every minute will be alive.'
These were not just the passing obsessions of Mr Toad, though Morris's efforts sometimes failed. The murals he painted on the upper walls of the Oxford Union sank and became illegible. Of his sturdy early furniture he remarked: 'If you want to be comfortable, go to bed.' But Morris was mastering a whole style of practical aesthetics, in what came to be called the Arts and Crafts idiom.
Perhaps it is this that appeals to modern eyes: a way of life. On a wall in Walthamstow, next to the Salvation Army secondhand shop, I saw painted the celebrated remark by Morris: 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.'
What then of the curious objects laid out on Hadrian Garrard's table to form part of the exhibition? There are things from round the world, made by mass production and computerised techniques: a tasteful pair of Nike trainers in that famous Willow design; a Japanese waving cat or a pair of Doc Martens in the Strawberry Thief design; ­fabric with Hello Kitty hiding amid stylised Morris foliage. There is also a charming sequinned jacket made from Strawberry Thief fabric for a wedding in Pakistan. Walthamshow FC even play in a Morris and Co strip, with home and away variations.
'Morris was not a luddite,' ­Garrard says. 'He would have been dismayed at the execution of some work with his designs in places like China. But there are still examples of hand skill and craft. One of the exhibits in Morris Mania is a carpet made at Axminster.'
He mentions Morris's socialist essay from 1884: 'A Factory As It Might Be'. The factory should have a garden. 'Our factory must make no sordid litter, befoul no water, nor poison the air with smoke.' Morris wrote. 'Our buildings will be beautiful with their own beauty of simplicity as workshops.' At the Merton Abbey works where Morris & Co dyed and printed textiles, ­cotton was washed in the river Wandle. In the century and more since, the Wandle was for decades a polluted watercourse, before its green restoration.
Old photographs of Merton Abbey show not clanking machinery but workshops with natural light where men printed fabric on long tables using wooden blocks placed skilfully by hand. In the ­William Morris Gallery's secure store (like a huge bank vault with rolling shelves) Garrard showed me some of the original pearwood printing blocks inlaid with metal. In the face of some, cracks are ­visible. Two days of soaking in water closes those up and printing can begin. Such industrial relics are ordinarily lost when factories close, but these blocks, in use till 1950, were later given to the gallery by the John Lewis partnership.
Morris's revolutionary socialism remained uncomfortable. As his biographer Fiona MacCarthy pointed out, it was only three years after decorating the throne room at St James's Palace that he joined a new revolutionary party led by the Marxist Henry Hyndman. ­Morris was 49, at the height of his commercial and literary ­reputation. A year later he led a breakaway movement, the Socialist League, which sought to abolish parliamentary rule.
Morris made speeches in the street and in 1885 appeared before a magistrate charged with assaulting a policeman and breaking his helmet. Asked, 'What are you?' he replied: 'I am an artist, and a literary man, pretty well known, I think, throughout Europe.' He was released, but the contradictions of his life weighed upon him, as both the capitalist owner of a decorating company and a revolutionary leader. He gave up neither role, making more than 100 speeches at protest meetings in 1887 alone, but going on to develop his design work in new areas, notably printing.
Morris doggedly read Marx's Das Kapital (in French). His fellow socialist Edward Carpenter described his public speaking, 'fighting furiously there on the platform with his own words, hacking and hewing the stubborn English phrases out – his tangled grey mane tossing, his features reddening with the effort!'
Hadrian Garrard notes a posthumous irony: photographs show that after the storming of the Winter Palace by the Bolsheviks in 1917, William Morris wallpaper (Garden Tulip) commissioned by Tsar ­Nicholas II was visible behind the smashed furniture.
To me the unreal vision of a socialist idyll like Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), in which there is no money, no private ­property and no big cities, owes more to a pastoral medievalism than to Marx. Moreover that novel was printed in a beautiful but expensive edition at the Kelmscott Press that Morris founded in his last years. A copy went at auction recently for £6,300.
Of course most of the Victorians' effort, we can see now, went to a remaking of the Middle Ages in their own terms. Gavin Stamp, the great architectural historian, called his book on Gilbert Scott Gothic for the Steam Age. Steam enabled machine-made manufacture and it propelled Scott round the country restoring churches. Incensed by his proposals for Tewkesbury Abbey, Morris appealed for an association 'to keep watch on old monuments, to protest against all 'restoration''. With Philip Webb's support, this came into being in 1877 as the ­Society for the Protection of Ancient Building, or Anti-Scrape as Morris liked to call it, in reference to the vice of scraping the surface off medieval stone walls to freshen up their appearance.
It struck me on my walk back to Walthamstow Central station that the people of this increasingly ­affluent suburb show inherent ­sympathy with arts, crafts and the protection of old buildings. Jewel Street, for example, is lined with terraced houses, built around 1900, most restored at much expense.
Some have acquired unsuitable porches and plastic window frames; some have been given a modern makeover as though they were a new branch of Flat Iron, that ­burgeoning steak restaurant chain. But others proudly retain painted-glass in the front doors and boast remodelled wooden glazing bars. In those houses no doubt we should find cushions, tea-cosies and wallpaper in a William Morris design.