Arts & Crafts and Adult Education

This page is still under construction but please see examples of key figures in Arts and Crafts and Adult Education below.

 

Charles AshbeeCharles Ashbee

Ashbee was a key player in the English Arts and Crafts movement.   After reading history at Kings College, Cambridge, and studying Architecture, Ashbee set up his Guild and School of Handicraft in 1888, while a resident at Toynbee Hall, a settlement* in Whitechapel, London. All of Ashbee’s craftsmen were self-taught amid a Guild spirit of learning together through shared experience, which was actively fostered by Ashbee.  Ashbee later sought to create a rural community as an alternative way of life for the thousands of people living in the thick acrid stenches and squalor of urban life. His ideas had a growing currency in the early years of the twentieth century, but they were not new. They were based on the successful garden cities, such as Letchworth (1903) and Hampstead Garden Suburb (1907) both one time members of the ECA.

*The ECA was originally founded as the Educational Settlements Association, and Toynbee Hall was the original University settlement house of the Settlement movement.

     

 

William MorrisWilliam Morris

Morris was an English artist, writer and socialist. He was one of the principal founders of the British Art and Craft movement.
Born on his family's estate of Elm House in Walthamstow, he went to school at Marlborough College, but left in 1851 after a student rebellion there. He then went to Exeter College, Oxford after studying for his matriculation to the university. He became influenced by the work of art and social critic John Ruskin while there.

Following John Ruskin's earlier example, a number of Arts and Crafts Guilds were set up from the 1880s onwards. In 1884 the Art Workers Guild was founded, and in 1892 Morris became the Master of this guild. These guilds had a spirit of learning together through shared experience, key to the ECA's philosophy when it was founded, and still important today.

ECA members the Victoria and Albert Museum house decorative works by Morris and his associates. The Morris Room at the V&A was designed by Morris in the 1860s as the "green dining room", and features stained glass windows and panel figures by Burne-Jones, panels with branches of fruit or flowers by Morris, olive branches and a frieze by Philip Webb.

 

Andrew FairbairnAndrew Fairbairn,

Fairbairn was the former vice president of the ECA died in 2007. He had a passion for Lifelong learning and a strategic approach to developing his concept of the Community Centre/College.Andrew also saw the importance of arts and crafts in Adult Education; introducing training for teachers of dress, embroidery and allied crafts to adults, in conjunction with Nottingham University and Loughborough College of Adult Education in 1972/3. This is a theme that has continued in more recent years, and further cements the ECA's keen focus on the Arts in Education.