William Morris Society

I have been a long-time member of the  William Morris Society and was  a Trustee 2011-18. I was elected Chair in May 2014 having been Vice Chair and Chair of the Communications Committee in 2013. It is based  at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, London where Morris lived in the latter part of his life.

Until I stepped down as Chair at the AGM in May 2018 I  led a major change programme at the Society which included its establishment as a Charitable Incorporated Organization in January 2015, a new visual identity and re-branding exercise with international design company Pentagram, and the launch of Heritage Lottery Fund-supported partnership with the Emery Walker Trust, called Arts & Crafts Hammersmith.

It is working closely with partners across the country on Morris-related programmes and exhibitions including Turner Prize winner Jeremy Deller’s ‘Love is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol’ at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery which ran to September 2015. A joint symposium with Surrey University’s Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity was held in February 2018.

For the outcome of my work on the provenance of the Hammersmith Socialist League photograph, see the sub-section on this  site.

The  Society ran a trip to Iceland ‘In the  foot steps of William Morris’, in July 2013 which I organized. This was successfully repeated in July 2016 and another is  happening from 23 July 2023, the 150th anniversary  of Morris’s second visit. My chapter on Morris and Iceland appears in the ‘Routledge Companion to William Morris’  published in  October 2020.