In February 1885 William Morris wrote, “Like most of our East Enders, Frank Kitz is certainly somewhat tinged with anarchism… but I like him very much. I called on the poor chap at the place where he lived, and it fairly gave me the horrors.’ Morris was on friendly terms with Anarchists Frank Kitz and Charles Mowbray, who in 1885 were living in one of East London’s most deprived slum areas – the Old Nichol, on the Bethnal Green/Shoreditch border.

Join us for an evening with historian and author Sarah Wise, as she explores William Morris’s encounters with East London’s poorest districts in his passionate campaign for socialism.

• Sarah Wise is the author of four books about British social history – the second, The Blackest Streets, is a portrait of the Old Nichol slum in East London. She teaches 19^th-century social history and literature to undergraduates and adult learners and is visiting professor at the University of California’s London Study Center. Read more about Sarah.

Image: William Morris (1880), Photograph by Abel Lewis

Join artists and makers at the Gallery on Saturday 13 September, for an evening exploring William Morris’s ideas around manufacturing, design and where his legacy sits in today’s world of mass consumerism. This event is part of the Morris Mania events and activities programme, which opens on 5 April, celebrating the Gallery’s 75th Anniversary year.

Details of speakers coming soon.

London Textile Month, organised by Selvedge, is a whole month of textile related events, coming to London during September 2025.

Read more about London Textile Month.

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

THIS EVENT IS NOW SOLD OUT

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

“If Morris saw in the industrialised, stratified and exploitative world of the Victorians ‘sordid, aimless, ugly confusion . . . the dull squalor of civilisation’, imagine what he’d make of the present day. Ecological catastrophe, species collapse, and still the unstoppable obsession with growth, the blind faith in technology as a get-out card. The metaverse, colonies on Mars, microplastics, coups carried out on Twitter: how Morris would have raged and grieved.” Olivia Laing, The Garden Against Time, 2024

Both Olivia Laing and Jeremy Deller are deeply influenced by the utopian socialism of the artist, writer and activist William Morris. In 2015, Deller curated an exhibition about Morris’s work, Love is Enough which brought together his work alongside Andy Warhol’s. In her new book, The Garden Against Time, Laing explores the fertile vision of a common Eden propagated by Morris.

In this special talk at William Morris Gallery, Olivia Laing will be in conversation with Jeremy Deller to discuss Morris’s utopian vision and what it means in our own century of late capitalism and ecological catastrophe.

The event will be chaired by Hadrian Garrard, Director, William Morris Gallery.

• 6.00pm: Doors open
• 6.30pm – 7.30pm: Talk and Q&A
• 7.30pm – 7.45pm: Book signing
• 7.45pm – 9pm: Drinks and Private View

Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She’s the author of seven books, including To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), The Lonely City (2016) and Everybody (2021). She’s a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages. Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times, among many other publications. She’s written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans and Chantal Joffe. Her collected essays on art, Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency, were published in 2020.

Portrait: Sandra Mickiewicz

Jeremy Deller studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. He won the Turner Prize in 2004 for his work Memory Bucket and represented Britain in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013. His projects over the past two decades, such as Battle of Orgreave (2001),We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016) as well as the documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984-1992( 2019) have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art. In 2015 he curated the exhibition Love is Enough: William Morris & Andy Warhol at Modern Art Oxford bringing together iconic and rarely seen works by two giants of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Portrait: David Clack

Join us for an exciting evening exploring and expanding on the themes of the book, Mingei / Art Without Heroes. 

Originating in Japan in the 1920s, the Mingei movement was based on the principle that beauty is inherent in handmade, everyday objects created by anonymous craftspeople. Spearheaded by the philosopher Yanagi Sōetsu, and potters Hamada Shōji and Bernard Leach, the movement sought to elevate the status of folk craft in a rapidly modernising society.

Mingei / Art Without Heroes covers a wide range of objects associated with Mingei, from ceramics and furniture to textiles and toys, alongside a series of profiles of leading designers and makers working in Japan today. Contributors from a variety of backgrounds explore Mingei’s origins, interpretations and contemporary implications, shedding new light on the ways in which the principles of the movement remain relevant to today’s personal, social and environmental concerns.

This event forms part of the Mingei on the Move public programme, designed in response to the Gallery’s Art Without Heroes: Mingei exhibition. The programme spotlights the diasporic nature of Mingei and why artists from all cultures and backgrounds are continually inspired by the movement’s ethos.

• 6pm – 6:30pm Doors Open
• 6:30pm – 7:30pm Panel Discussion
• 7:30pm – 9pm Private View

Mingei / Art Without Heroes is edited by Roisin Inglesby and published by Yale University Press. Read more about the book here.

Tomo Yoshizawa is a journalist and cultural translator, based in Japan.

In collaboration with The Japan Foundation.