A banner made for the Hammersmith Socialist League, the group William Morris founded and campaigned in, goes on public display as a highlight at the William Morris Gallery, which has now reopened for its first major rehang since 2012. Lent by the Working Class Movement Library in Manchester, it was made for people who wanted to be counted, and it sets the tone for a reopening that treats cloth as evidence of how Morris lived and what he believed.
Hammersmith Socialist Society Banner, ca. 1890s, Reputedly used by William Morris during his lectures ca 1884-1892.
Today also marks 130 years since Morris died, and the Gallery, set in the Walthamstow house where he lived as a teenager, has used the anniversary to rethink how his work should be shown in a domestic setting. Sam Jacob Studio took decoration and colour as its working tools, as Morris did, restoring the homely character of Water House while echoing the moods of the houses he made later. Local craftspeople, from embroiderers to glass blowers, contributed to the interiors, which carries his ethic of sustainable making into the fabric of the building.
Left: Flower Garden Portière, design for embroidery (c.1892), May Morris. Right: Portrait of May Morris (c. 1908), as photographed by G.C. Beresford.
The needlework is where the rehang becomes particularly interesting. May Morris's design for Flower Garden embroidery dates from her time as Director of Embroidery at Morris & Co., her father's firm, and it puts a woman's authorship at the centre of a business often told through one name. Kate Faulkner receives similar attention, and the Gallery's research invites visitors to ask who drew and who stitched, and whose names history chose to keep.
Morris's personal copy of One Thousand and One Nights, displayed for the first time, shows where some of his imaginative appetite came from: folktales gathered from North Africa, West Asia, Central Asia and South Asia that fed his writing and his interest in Asian decorative arts. The galleries pair that reading with a closer look at the influence of South Asian and Islamic art on his designs, which invites viewers to read a Morris repeat as a long conversation with older traditions of pattern, where a trailing stem or flower head has travelled a very great distance.
Clockwise from top left: William Morris, working drawing for 'Medway' chintz (1885), Cartoon design for 'Medway' printed cotton (1885), Medway printed cotton (design registered 21 September 1885).
Among the rare personal items is a lock of Morris's hair, cut after his death by his close friend and fellow socialist John Carruthers, and its place in a textile-led display feels apt, since hair worked into keepsakes was a familiar way of holding on to the dead in Victorian Britain.
Earthly Paradise: Radical Living in the UK opens alongside the rehang, tracing the people and places that have shaped art and activism in Britain over 200 years, and the Morris Today gallery follows in 2027, inviting contemporary artists and designers to answer Morris with new commissions, the first of which will be announced in early 2027.
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Further Information:
The 2026 William Morris rehang is now on view at the William Morris Gallery, Walthamstow, London.
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Image Credits:
Lead: Lock of William Morris's hair in silver frame (c. late 1890s). Made by Robert Catterson-Smith (1853 - 1938)
All images courtesy of William Morris Gallery, and as credited in captions.