Bloomsbury Festival, 2010: William Morris Walk
On the surprisingly sunny Sunday afternoon of the Bloomsbury Festival, I led
a group of over fifty people around some of the sites associated with William
Morris, in an itinerary which took in Tavistock Square (where I discussed the
Morris family's renumerative shares in the Great Consul Copper Mines down
on Bedford estate lands near Tavistock, Devon), St George's Gardens (where
Morris's support for and ambivalence about Octavia Hill's Kyrle Society came
into play), Great Ormond Street (where Morris lived, and lectured at the
Working Men's College), Queen Square (where the Society for the Protection
of Ancient Buildings was born, and where Morris lived in rooms for a time over
the workshop of his design company, The Firm), and ended under the British
Museum portico, as described in Morris's utopian romance News from
Nowhere. The group was (surprisingly) mixed demographically, with a whole
variety of types, from serious Morris enthusiasts to a couple who had
managed to come on the wrong walk and who had never heard of him. It was
particularly good to spot someone I recognised from the Friends of Brunswick
Square, where I gave a talk last year.
Matt Ingleby