As I once mentioned in a post about a pie, eel and mash shop, it is difficult for some people to think of Walthamstow without thinking of William Morris, who grew up here as a young man and who has a museum dedicated to his life and works on Forest Road in the house his family moved to after his father's death. Morris was born in Elm House in Clay Hill, Walthamstow, the son of a rich mining speculator and was able in the days before compulsory state organised primary education to run and play freely in the locality dreaming of chivalry and medieval deeds of yore, especially when the family moved on to live at Woodford Hall as Dad's Cornish investments began to pay off for him handsomely. The Water House, the pile which they moved into after his death and which now houses the museum, was actually something of a coming down in the world for the privileged Master Morris.

Morris was educated for three years at Marlborough, where he was noted for a violent temper and is believed to have filled his head with Walter Scott's Waverley Novels and Edward Willam Lane's One Thousand and One Arabian Nights between wandering round local churches. He then went to a tutor to be crammed before going on to Oxford in the expectation he'd become a priest. At Oxford, however, he fell in with a rum crowd of arty types and spongers who would tell him how great his poetry was while he invested his inheritance in publishing theirs. (At 21 he had an income of a thousand pounds a year and had been given the nickname "Top".) Pals included Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He could have ended up in the Bullingdon Club. Instead he swooned over Tennyson and founded the "Oxford and Cambridge Magazine".

After university, he dabbled in architecture for a bit and then went into trade, designing and selling soft furnishings, murals, furniture and stained glass to the middle classes, for which he sought inspiration by plundering the art and artisanship of the middle ages. There was a ready market for this stuff in an industrial age before DIY and IKEA when a lot of factory-produced furniture for the aspirational masses was junk, which of course, it still is. This activity and aesthetic had an entire philosophy behind it which became known as Arts and Crafts.

Never one to settle to any one activity, the talented William Morris also wrote novels, poetry, set up his own press and engaged in liberal and left-wing politics, joining, founding and leaving a number of worthy political movements and debating societies, such as the National Liberal League, the Democratic Federation and the Socialist League. He was always very generous with his points of view, and, as a self-taught man, gave evidence to a Royal Commission on Technical Instruction in 1882.

One of the more famous of his opinions is a slogan of our local authority: "Fellowship is life", though it is noticeable that his business partners, who also included Philip Webb and Ford Madox-Brown, gradually drifted away from working closely with him over the years and he never got round to redistributing his wealth to the masses, whose rights to experience his Art he championed so vigorously.

Apart from the museum, a number of other public buildings in the locality commemorate his contributions to art and socialism, such as the fitness shed called the Kelmscott Leasure Centre on Markhouse Road (named after his printing press and what today would be called a vanity publisher I presume, rather than the tudor country pile Morris leased on the proceeds of his anti-capitalist business activities). This is an ironic commemoration of a man who founded The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings as it is one building no-one will be sad to see bulldozed in years to come, though the recent row between that society and Prince Charles suggests some members may think I am wrong on this.

He also gave his name to one of the local wards, one which was probably quite nice when he grew up in the area before Walthamstow fell into the hands of developers later on in the 19th Centrury. The area now suffers from some pockets of serious crime and poor social conditions.

He was born on 24 March 1834, which is exactly 175 years ago. His designs are well worth a look. His best-known writings include 'The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems', 'The Earthly Paradise', 'A Dream of John Ball' and the 'News from Nowhere'.

[Updated 13 July 2009]