HOUSES ONCE LIVED in by celebrated men and women make disconcerting museums. Accident and luck as much as bequest and acquisition lie behind their often haphazard accumulations of furniture, pictures and memorabilia. The pull of personality is inflected by whatever material objects have survived in buildings often unsuited to their display. Most such houses contain perhaps only a handful of ‘exhibits’ that the memorialised individuals would have recognised as their own: how depressing are those guide-book words ‘furnished in the style of the period’ when what we want to see is the actual desk, bed, easel or breakfast cup. Attempts at the look of ‘just-left-the-room’ invariably evoke an amateur production of a drawing-room murder mystery, yet informative museum display can kill any lingering domestic authenticity. Nevertheless there is much to be grateful for and Britain is dotted with the houses of the illustrious dead where a few splinters of the True Cross may be seen. That several such houses in London – from Sigmund Freud in Hampstead to Lord Leighton in Kensington, from Handel in Mayfair to Hogarth in Chiswick – have survived in so blitzed and bulldozed a city is remarkable; but it is not short of a miracle that the young William Morris’s home in Walthamstow, north London, escaped the complete development of that area in the later nineteenth century from village to sprawling suburb. Known as the William Morris Gallery since it opened in 1950, it offers riches comparable, in quality at least, with similar holdings at the Victoria and Albert Museum; but its future is under a cloud.

The Gallery occupies a commodious country house built in the mid-eighteenth century. Its once spacious grounds are now a public park offering some refuge from the ceaseless traffic passing its gates. The house was the Morris family home between 1848 and 1856 when William was at Marlborough and Oxford, occupied therefore before his life’s work had begun. Unlike Kelmscott Manor or Red House, the biographical connections are sketchy but the house inside has not been radically changed. It was given to the Borough of Walthamstow in 1898 and plans for a Morris Museum were afoot in the 1930s, a collection already being assembled before it was officially opened by the Labour prime minister, Clement Attlee, for whom Morris had been an inspiring figure.

What we see now is a curious amalgam of house and museum. Although no attempt is made to recreate period interiors, the visitor cannot escape the sense of being in what once were reception rooms or bedrooms. The introductory display that charts Morris’s early life in Walthamstow, at Marlborough and Oxford, his marriage to Jane Burden and the building of Red House is exemplary, interweaving biography with examples of Morris’s work and that of his colleagues. Further ground-floor rooms expand on his career and the Morris & Co. showrooms in Queen Square and Oxford Street (the closure of the latter in 1940 led to much invaluable archival material coming to the collection then being assembled). As far as Morris is concerned, these are the crucial rooms. Upstairs the story of design in the Arts and Crafts period continues with a room devoted to A.H. Mackmurdo containing furniture, metalwork and textiles (including a printed cotton by Herbert Horne, who provided the cover and lettering for this Magazine, used from 1903 to 1948). Other rooms display works from the gift of the painter and designer Sir Frank Brangwyn. This is a mixed blessing. Too much wall space is devoted to his prints and paintings which, often blowsy and picturesque, seem out of kilter with the other displays. But Brangwyn was an apprentice of Morris & Co. in the 1880s and there are some excellent examples of his later ‘modernist’ furniture, including a cherry and walnut dresser and a glazed cabinet, both of 1930, that bring the story told here into the twentieth century. Although there is certainly room for improvement in the somewhat overcrowded displays, and a whiff in the air of someone living in reduced circumstances, the Gallery is an exceptional source of pleasure and education.

In the last few months, as readers may well be aware, the Gallery has been in the news as the victim of cuts by the London Borough of Waltham Forest. Its opening hours are to be reduced; school visits will take place through special appointment only; its staff reductions since the 1980s have culminated in the dismissal of its long-serving and internationally known curator, Peter Cormack. Such cuts are lamentable from several points of view: if the Gallery has no curatorial expertise, it will remain static and die; the area has precious little in the way of museums and galleries; the Borough Council, as confirmed by the huge protests against its cuts – locally, nationally and internationally – seems to be out of touch with Morris’s immense importance as designer, writer and polemicist. Over ten thousand people have signed an online petition against the Council’s shortsighted move. A proposed Heritage Lottery bid for the regeneration of the surrounding park and expansion of the Gallery’s ‘facilities’ is seriously endangered by these cuts. Accessibility should be increased, not diminished; the collection added to, not put in aspic. A more enthusiastic Council would be ashamed rather than seemingly proud to admit that the Gallery ‘does not receive any national or international funding’.1

Forty years ago, Philip Henderson, in the preface to his biography of Morris (1967), wrote that at a time of fast-moving destruction and a standardised environment it was important to heed Morris’s words on the indissoluble equation of ‘what made life worth living’ and the causes that Morris fought for. The Gallery named after him is a modest but luminous example of something worth fighting for, as so many protesters on its behalf have made clear.

1  See ‘Morris gallery is not under threat’, Letters, The Guardian, 19th April 2007.