William Morris Gallery
Morris’s childhood home in Walthamstow is now the world’s only public museum devoted to his life and the Arts & Crafts movement. The galleries balance beauty and politics: pattern blocks and dye samples sit beside Kelmscott Press books, medieval inspirations and his socialist campaigning. It’s compact, kid-friendly, and free—plan 60–90 minutes, then decompress in Lloyd Park behind the house.
Opening Hours
What's not to miss inside?
Pattern Lab
How repeats become wallpapers and textilesYou see the jump from hand-sketched motifs to carved blocks and finished repeats—Morris’s craft stripped to its moving parts.
📍 Ground floor, early galleries
Dye & Print
Natural colour, revivedMorris rejected chemical shortcuts; indigo vats and madder reds brought back the slow, luminous colour of vegetable dyes.
📍 Ground floor, materials section
Kelmscott Press Room
The ‘book beautiful’Black ink, dense borders, and Burne-Jones wood-engravings show how Morris re-imagined the book as a total artwork.
📍 First floor
Wallpaper Icons
Patterns that shaped British taste‘Strawberry Thief’, ‘Willow’, ‘Seaweed’—nature stylised into endlessly livable rooms.
📍 First floor, design gallery
Lloyd Park & Garden Views
Context for a nature-first designerFrom the café windows to the herbaceous borders, the park frames Morris’s belief that beauty belongs in everyday life.
📍 Rear of the house
Inspire your Friends
- The gallery won Art Fund Museum of the Year in 2013—remarkable for a free, local authority museum.
- Morris lived here as a teenager (1848–56) in the Georgian ‘Water House’; his walks in the Lea Valley fed the plant forms that later recur in his patterns.
- ‘Strawberry Thief’ was inspired by thrushes stealing fruit at Kelmscott Manor—proof that irritation can birth an icon.
- Morris co-founded a firm with six friends in 1861 (Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co.), effectively inventing a modern design studio that handled everything from stained glass to furniture.
