William Morris's debt to Islam

When William Morris was born in Walthamstow, in 1834, it was little more than a clump of marshland at the edge of the Epping Forest. This was the terrain of his free, frolicsome childhood, and it would forever form his image of humble, Edenic England, uncorrupted by the industrialist’s yoke. About the only thing that remains of this prelapsarian Walthamstow, amid its railway lines and brownfield sites, is the family home where Morris grew up, in some splendour – now a gallery dedicated to his artistic legacy.

‘To us pattern designers, Persia has become a holy land, for there our art was perfected’

The landscape has been supplanted, and much of the population transplanted. Next door to the William Morris Gallery is a Hindu temple where a gargoyle of the elephant deity Lord Ganesh keeps watch. Parading past the gallery every year is Europe’s largest birthday procession for the Prophet Muhammad. The manufacturing revolution Morris despised made Walthamstow a redoubt of the east London proletariat, which eventually encompassed a large community descended from Pakistani, Turkish and West Indian labourers.

What would Morris have made of this? His feeling for the British working class is well-known. ‘Art is man’s expression of his joy in labour,’ Morris wrote, believing that capitalism, by taking the artisan out of his own atelier and into the factory, had stolen from the creative natives of this land the artistic enjoyment that was their birthright. But how Morris would perceive immigration and the non-western cultures it has brought with it is much less studied than his socialism. William Morris & Art from the Islamic World, a new exhibition at the William Morris Gallery, may therefore be a turning point for our conception of an artist central to our national identity.