The Arts & Crafts Movement

After the Guild was forced to cease all activities in 1919, Ashbee’s career came to a turning point. It was then that he was appointed Civic Adviser to the city of Jerusalem. He was in charge of rebuilding the city and protecting the ancient buildings and historical monuments. His extensive knowledge in urbanism and his love for the preservation of ancient buildings were particularly useful for this task. He lived in Jerusalem to carry out this most ambitious project from 1919 to 1923, and he resigned from his post in 1922. Thereafter, he went back to England and retired in Godden Green in Kent

With this in mind, Ashbee created in 1888, while still active in Toynbee Hall, the Guild and School of Handicraft in the same neighbourhood. While the school only lasted until 1895, the Guild flourished. The Guild was a workshop combining the principles of the Arts and Crafts as well as the social aspects Ashbee had learned with his social work. Five workmen constituted the small staff that begun the Guild of Handicraft under the supervision of Ashbee. They made furniture and worked with metal. The year following the creation of the workshop, they participated in the second exhibition of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition society as members of the co-operative of craft workers in leather, wood, metal and jewellery. In 1891, the Guild moved to Essex House still in the East End while a retail shop was implanted in the West End so it would be more accessible to the patrons of the Guild.

For him, the Socialist movement seemed to be the only solution to the problems of Victorian society, particularly the complications emerging from the Industrial Revolution.

No one desires to be free from work, but to be free and self-directive in his work. The machine in doing the drudgery of the world is undoubtedly an instrument for the furthering of industrial liberty. Voluntary co-operative individualism is the goal toward which the whole industrial world is now tending.

If the man in his industrial activities is not permitted to exercise his individuality, it is folly to educate the child in freedom. If education be expression, the child’s self-activity cannot stop at the boundary of schoolyards

If education is life, then the general life must be so shaped as to be in itself educative.

The definition of art founded upon the current metaphysics of beauty is a class definition, and is intended to preserve the upper classes in their special privileges of culture and “taste

It will thus be seen that Morris’s definition of art is social in its bearing. It implies the modern necessity of building up the ornamental part of life, its pleasures of every nature, on the basis of work undertaken cheerfully, with the consciousness of helping ourselves and our fellows.

if the work be individualised, it becomes to that degree a work of art, a part of the pleasure of men’s lives, the source of happiness

When the consumer finds in the goods he has purchased no real fitness, no response to his needs, no appeal to memory or associations, no real adjustment between the body and its garments, he can experience no genuine pleasure or rational satisfaction – in most cases the shoes actually pinch his feet, and the clothes constrain some part of the body.