Conservation cleaning in the small and intimate surroundings of Emery Walker’s House at 7 Hammersmith Terrace soon becomes quite personal. At the end of a long, careful and therefore tiring day there is the temptation to look up at the severe, but kindly Victorian demeanour of Emery Walker above the fire place and ask, ‘ Well, what do you think? Have I missed anything?’This is certainly no vast pile calling for armies of conservationists at considerable cost. Indeed, cramped for space and…
”Then we turned from the blossoms, and cold were they grown:In the trees the wind westering moved;Till over the threshold back fluttered her gown,And in the dark house was I loved.”This is the final stanza in William Morris’s poem Thunder In The Garden, from his book Poems By The Way, published in 1891 as some kind of scrap book with older texts, new poems written on the way to somewhere, for newspapers and directly for his political mission.”Thunder”, is one of the new ones, maybe written just…
It was a Thursday, we had just come off the Eurostar from Bruxelles for six days in London, and we seized the moment: ”Kelmscott is open today, wo-hoooo”. Straight off on the bus to Hammersmith.We found a very cool Brutalist town hall and a nice Polish café. And a Pooh-ish smackerel it was time for 26 Upper Mall, a magic address. Reaching the river, just when the sun broke through, was the journey’s best moment. Ebb. A rowing team was training at the beach. Morris used to watch the boat races…
