The Burston Strike School
As May Morris told Bernard Shaw in 1885, Kelmscott Manor was 'an old house which my sister and I consider the only house in England worth inhabiting'. Pardonable family pride perhaps, for the stone-built Oxfordshire house, unspectacularly situated at the farthest end of the village near to the towpath on one of the highest reaches of the river Thames, is indeed a lovely dwelling.
May's father, the poet, designer and famous socialist, William Morris, also loved the house, 'with a reasonable love, I think', he wrote, 'for though my words may give you no idea of any special charm about it, yet I assure you the charm is there; so much has the old house grown up out of the soil and the lives of those that lived on it'. And he described its historical appeal:
Some thin thread of tradition, a half-anxious sense of the delight of meadows and acre and wood and river; a certain amount (not too much let us hope) of common sense, a liking for making material serve one's turn, and perhaps at bottom some little grain of sentiment: this I think was what went into the making of the old house.
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