The William Morris Gallery is the only public museum devoted to English Arts and Crafts designer and early socialist William Morris.
The William Morris Gallery, opened by Prime Minister Clement Attlee in 1950, is located at Walthamstow in Morris’s family home from 1848 to 1856, the former Water House, a substantial Grade II* listed Georgian dwelling of about 1750.
Water House was set in its own extensive grounds (now Lloyd Park). The gallery underwent major redevelopment and reopened in August 2012; in 2013 it won the national prize for Museum of the Year.
The gallery’s collections illustrate Morris’s life, work and influence. They include printed, woven and embroidered fabrics, rugs, carpets, wallpapers, furniture, stained glass and painted tiles designed by Morris himself and by Edward Burne-Jones, Philip Webb, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Ford Madox Brown, and others who together founded the firm of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Company in 1861.
The gallery also holds a substantial collection of furniture, textiles, ceramics and glass by Morris’s followers in the Arts and Crafts movement, which flourished from the 1880s to the 1920s. Among those represented are Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo and the Century Guild, William De Morgan, May Morris, Ernest Gimson, Sidney Barnsley, George Jack, C.F.A. Voysey, Harry Powell, Selwyn Image, Henry Holiday, and Christopher Whall.
The William Morris Gallery is the only public museum devoted to English Arts and Crafts designer and early socialist William Morris.
