Beauty Beside The River

Clive Aslet enjoys a small exhibition that captures the spirit of William Morris’s London home and tells the story of its owners

TO William Morris, ‘the most important production of art’ was ‘a beautiful House’, followed by ‘a beautiful Book’. His ideal home, realised at Red House in Bexleyheath, Kent, and Kelmscott Manor in oxfordshire, was in the country, but business took him to London and it was here, in Hammersmith, that he found a terraced house of the 1780s called The Retreat. He renamed it Kelmscott House, after Kelmscott Manor. Both houses are on the Thames and, sometimes, with his powerful physique, he would row between the two.

From 1891, Hammersmith was home to the ‘little typographical adventure’ of the Kelmscott Press. one of the Albion presses that were used to print such sumptuous books as the Kelmscott Chaucer, with 87 woodcut illustrations by Burne-Jones, can be seen in the premises of the William Morris Society, which occupies the basement of the house and its former coach house, where this small display of artefacts is on show.

The society’s title for the exhibition—‘The dear warp and weft at Hammersmith’—is a quote from Morris, referring to the carpet weaving that Morris set up in the coach house. Not that the Morrises were the only remarkable occupants of 26, Upper Mall, to give Kelmscott House its postal address.