Our Arts and Crafts tour’s two title areas of exploration have been loved by all from romantic poets of the early 19th century to fans of the James Herriot books and TV series All Creatures Great and Small, while the tour’s starting point of Manchester is perhaps a more recently acquired taste – but what […]
Late November might not seem the most auspicious time of year to set out on a road trip north, but Elaine, who had just arrived from America, and I were blessed with winter sunshine at every stop on their recent recce for Arts and Crafts Tours for October 2022 tour of Yorkshire and the Lake […]
I’m a local now, and when out walking my dog across the flatlands a dozen miles south of Lincoln, the cathedral’s an abiding skyline presence – just as it would have been for those working this land nine hundred years ago. For Lincoln is probably England’s most spectacularly set cathedral, and a big rival to […]
So absorbing was the National Trust’s acquisition and opening to visitors of Ernest Gimson’s fabulous Stoneywell Cottage, I risked becoming overly Anglocentric – at least in an art history sense. After all, I reminded myself, the Arts & Crafts was a British movement, and the writings of those Victorian gents John Ruskin and William Morris […]
Ernest Gimson’s client at Stoneywell was his big brother, Sydney, who’d begun visiting the Charnwood Forest decades earlier for camping holidays with friends. Although within walking distance of Sydney’s Leicester home, it had seemed so remote the young campers took care to shade their lanterns lest they be spotted by imaginary brigands. But in middle […]
