Arts & Crafts in the Cotswolds - Art and artefacts in the buildings they were designed for

The coach leaves the hotel in Broadway at 9.30am and Oxford Railway Station at 11.00am. Begin in the Ashmolean Museum – a treasure-house of art and artefacts from many civilisations. Oxford was the meeting place of William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. Follow in their footsteps to the beautiful Burne- Jones windows in Christ Church Cathedral. Continue to Broadway, where all four nights are spent.

In 1902 C.R. Ashbee and his Guild of Handicraft arrived in the hitherto quiet village of Chipping Campden. Here they set up workshops, some of which survive to this day, and their lives and skills are celebrated in a small museum. The Gordon Russell museum showcases an Arts & Crafts-trained designer whose work is influential today.

In the morning visit Buscot Park, a Palladian mansion with Burne Jones paintings and outstanding gardens. Kelmscott is the most evocative and best known of the houses associated with William Morris. It looked to him as if it had ‘grown up out of the soil’, and became his spiritual as well as his family home.

Owlpen Manor, untouched since the 17th century, was sympathetically restored for the Mander family by craftsmen with sensitive respect for the past vernacular. In contrast, Rodmarton is one of the last country houses to be built and furnished in a traditional style, by hand with local stone, local timber and local craftsmen. Nearby Sapperton became home to several members of the Cotswolds group including Gimson and the Barnsleys. The first commission for Morris and Co was from architect G.F. Bodley for stained glass for All Saints Church on the Cotswold hills, which therefore contains work by Burne-Jones, Rossetti, Madox Brown, Philip Webb and Morris himself.

Designed in 1893 by C.F. Voysey, Perrycroft House sits high up in the Malverns above the village of Colwall. Commissioned by the industrialist John William Wilson, Voysey’s design incorporates the buttressed brickwork and whitewashed roughcast that subsequently became hallmarks of his style. It was reopened to the public in 2022. The Guild’s most important commission was the library for Lord Beauchamp at Madresfield Court, an ancient moated manor house sympathetically extended in the 19th century. At the same time the Birmingham Group led by Henry Payne decorated and furnished Madresfield’s celebrated chapel that so enchanted Evelyn Waugh, a family friend.

The Wilson Museum in Cheltenham, self-styled ‘capital’ of the Cotswolds, contains a nationally important Arts & Crafts collection. The coach takes you to Oxford Railway Station by c. 3.00pm before continuing to Broadway.

Some appointments cannot be confirmed until autumn 2025.