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The Guardian
11-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Guardian view on William Morris: how the Strawberry Thief took over the world
The great 19th-century designer William Morris wasn't thinking of a £2 floral iPhone cover when he wrote 'Tomorrow, the civilised world shall have a new art, a glorious art, made by the people and for the people.' In his lifetime he failed in his dream of making art for all, while paying his workers fairly. Only the homes of the wealthy were decorated by Morris & Co. As he feared, he had simply been 'ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich'. But today his designs can be found everywhere, from John Lewis to Chinese online marketplace Temu. His Strawberry Thief print is the most popular item in the V&A museum shop, and the internet is awash with AI-generated posters for fake William Morris V&A exhibitions. A new show, Morris Mania, at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, explores how his botanical prints went viral, with a callout to the public to loan their own Morris ephemera. Morris would be thrilled and appalled at this democratisation of his work. His legacy, like his life, is one of contradictions: he was a radical socialist and hugely successful businessman, who made wallpaper for Queen Victoria; a passionate champion of craftsmanship and workers' rights, whose designs have become a template for mass-produced tat. An early environmentalist, he raged against the waste and pollution of the industrial age. His 1890 utopian sci-fi novel News from Nowhere imagined a future in which there is no money, private property or big cities. In the end, he thought only upending the whole capitalist shebang would do. But Morris's ideals survived into the next century, influencing political thinking about the arts. Labour's Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan and Tony Blair were all fans. The ethos behind the Design Council, which celebrates its 80th anniversary this month, was not just to help rebuild the economy after the second world war but to improve people's everyday lives. Shops like Habitat and designers such as Terence Conran took up Morris's challenge to bring good design to the high street. In the return to 'Victorian values' of the Conservative 1980s, Laura Ashley filled homes with Morris-inspired soft furnishings. Even British nuclear submarines were upholstered in his rose-print linen (Morris would not have approved). Now we are having another Morris moment. Perhaps the joyful expression of nature in his patterns is the key to their enduring appeal. His motto, 'Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful', may have struck a chord in lockdown. Gen Z turned to crafting, and 'cottagecore' took off. For many, our homes are also our offices; we want them to be 'beautiful'. Morris has always been design's visionary and conscience. Today, we need him more than ever. As Morris mania proves, designers – however unwittingly – have played no small part in fuelling overconsumption. They have the power to shape our world and future. Eighty per cent of the environmental impact of any new product is determined at the design stage. Good design is no longer just about form and function. Designers are responding to the climate emergency with innovations that are aesthetic and sustainable. As globalisation itself is under scrutiny thanks to US tariffs, Morris reminds us to think about where goods come from and how they were made. Do you really need that cheap Strawberry Thief-patterned toothbrush holder?
The Guardian
07-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Curtains, wellies, nuclear subs and a tsar's palace: how William Morris mania swept the world
He has papered our walls and carpeted our floors, enlivened our curtains, coats and cups, and even infiltrated Britain's nuclear submarine fleet. Almost 130 years after his death, the Victorian arts and crafts designer William Morris has blanketed the world with his unmistakable brand of busy floral patterns, wrapping our lives with tasteful swathes of willow, blackthorn and pimpernel, peppered with cheeky strawberry-eating robins. There's no escape. 'I started seeing Morris everywhere,' says Hadrian Garrard, director of the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, east London, speaking with the air of someone trying to shake off a stalker. 'He's on phonecases, umbrellas, walking sticks – and about a third of the Victoria and Albert Museum gift shop. I thought it was time that we addressed how we got here – how did William Morris, Britain's greatest designer, go viral?' The question lies at the heart of the gallery's new exhibition, Morris Mania, which takes visitors on a chintzy romp through more than a century of floral fixtures, fittings, fashion and furnishings. It is a fascinating, if sometimes nausea-inducing, haul of pattern-smothered objects and stories, after which you, too, will probably notice Morris prints everywhere. Their popularity began in the designer's lifetime. A helpful timeline highlights the key moments that turned this avowed socialist into the unrivalled tastemaker to the middle and upper classes. With the opening of his first Morris & Co showroom on Oxford Street in 1877, and commissions to furnish St James's Palace and Balmoral Castle, his reputation soon spread among the ruling elite. Tsar Nicholas II of Russia caught wind of the fashionable Brit in 1895. He ordered 300 yards(275 metres) of Morris fabric and enough Garden Tulip wallpaper to line the apartments of his Winter Palace in St Petersburg. It didn't end well. A 1917 photograph shows one of the rooms ransacked, after the palace was stormed by the Bolsheviks. Everything is destroyed – except Morris's paper. His rustic vision of merrie olde England clings stubbornly to the walls. After the copyright of his work expired in 1966, the tsunami of mass-market Morris merch was unleashed. Laura Ashley opened its first branded shop in South Kensington, London, in 1968, swamping a generation of homes with floral curtains and cushions, while during the Thatcher years there was another Morris boom, with Tory calls to return to 'Victorian values'. With this came one of the most unlikely uses of Morris fabric in the exhibition: his rose-printed linen was used to upholster the seats of Royal Navy submarines – giving officers a nice reminder of cosy medieval Britain as they prepared to unleash nuclear war. Ironically, Morris had designed the pattern in 1883, just as he became increasingly critical of his country's imperialist ambitions and the futility of war. The exhibition design, by Sam Jacob, with graphics by Europa, is a gaudy treat, swallowing you into a dizzying Morris universe, with garish Morris carpet, loud Morris wallpaper and frilly Morris lightshades dangling from the ceiling, in a tasselled grannycore symphony. Vitrines showcase numerous Morris-patterned objects, from Past Times knick-knacks and museum shop scarves, to luxury Loewe handbags and collaborations with Nike and H&M. 'The patterns have escaped their original form by now,' says Jacob, whose work has long revelled in exploring the mimetic mutations of popular culture. 'It's a bit like in the film Alien – the patterns can land on anything and completely inhabit their host, whether that's a mug or a submarine.' One vitrine, focused on the commercial realm, shows how his designs have transcended the usual boundaries of high and low taste, being embraced by both exclusive couture and mass-produced tat. Morris might be synonymous with staid middle-class traditionalism, but even Habitat – founded by Terence Conran to bring sleek modernism to the masses – embraced Morris mania. Its 1971 catalogue flaunts Chesterfield sofas writhing with Honeysuckle fabric, their designs proudly described as being 'based on a Victorian original'. Morris's popularity in Asia also gets a look-in. There is a Japanese yukata, a type of kimono, made of the famous Strawberry Thief fabric. Look closely and you will see Hello Kitty faces peering from the foliage. There's a new Morris badminton kit from sports brand Yonex, its busy patterns likely to dazzle any opponent into missing the shuttlecock. There's also a ravishing pair of Morris patterned wedding jackets, made by local designer Zahra Amber for her wedding at the gallery, which she had embroidered in Kashmir. They stand alongside a dresser brimming with countless other trinkets donated by Morris fans, from a ceramic toast rack to a pack of cards. An entertaining film, made by Natalie Cubides-Brady, with help from US academic Sarah Mead Leonard of Twitter account Morris on Screen – features clips from more than 100 films and TV shows where patterns appear, from University Challenge to Call the Midwife, cementing Morris as a backdrop to countless lives. China is now one of the biggest Morris markets in the world, ever since the V&A's touring exhibition in 2023 smashed box office records. An iPad scrolls through the vast range of Morris-patterned merchandise available to buy from Chinese online marketplace Temu ('Shop like a billionaire!'), much of which is now AI-generated. 'We bought these for £2.99 each,' says Garrard, gesturing to a wall of Morris exhibition posters made in China – for shows that never happened. 'There are tons for sale online, all generated by AI. We could have covered the whole of Walthamstow with them.' This computer-generated, factory-made garbage might be anathema to the 'authentic' Morris products that are still being produced by skilled artisans, their laborious manual processes (celebrated in a soothing film) adorning everything from Brompton bikes to Tinker & Tallulah's lampshades. But in a way, the automated AI future aligns with Morris's own dreams. For his entire career, he was torn between a desire to make his designs accessible to everyone, while also wanting his workers to be well paid and live joyous, fulfilling lives. He concluded that it simply wasn't possible without a radical socialist revolution. In a wry nod to this, Garrard has included a copy of Fully Automated Luxury Communism, Aaron Bastani's provocative 2018 book, which pokes out of a mannequin's pockets. It imagines a time when 'society based on waged work becomes as much a relic as the feudal peasant', a vision not unlike that of Morris's novel News from Nowhere. We're almost there – if you can ignore the accusations of intellectual property theft and forced labour that plague sites such as Temu, as an AI-generated caption helpfully points out. At William Morris Gallery, London, from 5 April to 21 September
Telegraph
30-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Why the world went mad for William Morris
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.
