Event category: Adults

John Ruskin and William Morris spearheaded the movement that became known as Arts and Crafts, which embraced all aspects of art and life, including garden design. Richard Bisgrove will discuss the contributions of pioneering Arts and Crafts designers William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll, to the making of gardens, and to the improvement of human life, the central aim of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start.

By Richard Bisgrove: The Gardens of Gertrude Jekyll, (1992) and William Robinson: The Wild Gardener, (2008)

Image: Munstead: Iris and Lupin Border c.1911

In July 1871 thousands of Londoners gathered on the southern edge of Epping Forest to take part in a protest demonstration. A campaign was beginning – one that the historian and ecologist Oliver Rackham saw as the origin of the modern British conservation movement.

The struggle to preserve Epping Forest and other commons from unchecked housing development across London had its watershed moment that day. The demonstration was the turning point for a popular struggle which was to contribute to a change in the law – the 1878 Epping Forest Act .
This story, set within the wider narrative of campaigns to preserve the London commons, is told in this talk by east London historian Mark Gorman. The focus here is not on the metropolitan upper middle-class campaigners, but instead on the grass roots movement whose popular protests helped steer the campaign towards its successful conclusion.

Together with other metropolitan contests, the struggle to save Epping Forest contributed significantly to what has become the ‘right to roam’.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start.

Mark Gorman: Saving the People’s Forest: Open spaces, enclosure and popular protest in mid-Victorian London is published by University of Hertfordshire Press.

Photography: Roger Huddle

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In this talk, Rowan Bain, Principal Curator at the William Morris Gallery), will discuss her new book, published by Yale University Press to coincide with the Gallery’s exhibition William Morris and Art from the Islamic World. Rowan will provide insight into the book’s diverse perspectives on contextualising Morris’s role as a collector of Islamic art, and the enduring importance of recognising the contributions of various cultures to the evolution of his design and craftsmanship.

Doors open at 7pm for a 7.30pm start.

Image: © The Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge