Annette Carruthers, Mary Greensted, Barley Roscoe

Ernest Gimson

Arts & Crafts Designer and Architect

Yale University Press

2019   |  270 × 216mm   |  372pp

Remembrance of Things Past. ‘Here at last is the book we need on Ernest Gimson,’ writes Fiona MacCarthy, ‘one of the most fascinating figures in the Arts & Crafts Movement, the disciple of Morris who left London for the Cotswolds, forming a small community of makers with the mission of reviving the traditions of local country crafts.’ Gimson’s workshop was based at Daneway, near Cirencester, a picturesque building which epitomises the romance of the smaller manor houses of the Cotswolds.

From 1919 until 1932 Daneway was the home of Emery Walker, the proprietor of The Doves Press; from 1948 until 1968, that of the architect Oliver Hill. On his death the lease was taken on by his sister-in-law and her husband, Anne and Anthony Denny. Their son Tom, now a pre-eminent stained glass artist, became a friend of mine at Edinburgh College of Art and, as a young man, I frequently stayed at Daneway, where he lived with a group of artists. Nearly forty years on, back in Edinburgh, it was very evocative to re-visit that peerless house, albeit on the computer screen.