History

Morris took the lease on the Upper Mall house in 1878, shortly after his return from Iceland and during a period of intense political and artistic activity. He renamed it Kelmscott House after his beloved Oxfordshire manor, some 130 kilometres upriver — a deliberate act of geographical imagination, as if the same stretch of the Thames connected both homes. The name also signalled his attachment to the idea of the river as a living thread through English landscape and memory.

During the eighteen years Morris lived here, the house functioned as both home and hub. The coach house basement was the site of regular meetings of the Hammersmith Socialist Society, which Morris founded in 1884. Lectures, readings, and debates brought together figures central to late-Victorian radical politics and decorative arts. The Kelmscott Press — established in 1890 in rented premises in nearby Hammersmith — produced some of the most influential private press books of the century, including the 1896 Chaucer, completed just weeks before Morris died. Morris supervised the Press’s design work from this address.

Morris died at Kelmscott House on 3 October 1896. The cause was given as exhaustion brought on by overwork across too many fields simultaneously. He was 62. Subsequent tenants included George MacDonald, the Scottish novelist, who had lived here before Morris; the house had already attracted writers and artists before it became an Arts and Crafts landmark. The William Morris Society acquired use of the coach house and basement in the twentieth century and established the museum and archive that now occupies those spaces.