Emery Walker’s Trust announces 2026 events to celebrate 175 year birthday

The dining room at Emery Walker’s house; Photograph by Lucinda MacPherson

Emery Walker’s House celebrates the 175th anniversary of his birth

Emery Walker’s house is a west London jewel – the 19th century home on Chiswick Mall of one of the leading lights of the Arts & Crafts movement, it is stuffed full of beautiful furnishings and artefacts – Morris & Co textiles and wallpapers; furniture and other items designed by Philip Webb, but also 17th and 18th-century English furniture, Middle-Eastern rugs, and Chinese and Moroccan ceramics.

It feels like what it is – their home, exactly how Arts & Crafts protagonists would have decorated their homes, and as if they Emery Walker and his daughter had just popped out for a walk to see their friends round the corner, William Morris and his daughter May.

The house, at 7 Hammersmith Terrace, is also thought to be one of the few houses in the world to have original Morris & Co wallpaper in nearly every room in the house -hand blocked wallpapers which date back to the 1920s and some are rare designs and colourways.

Emery Walker

To celebrate the 175th anniversary of his birth, the Emery Walker’s House Trust has organised a programme of celebratory public events throughout 2026. There is a new biography of Emery Walker coming out in April.

The Arts & Crafts typographer and printer set up the Doves Press – named after the nearby Dove pub – with bookbinder Thomas Cobden-Sanderson at 1 Hammersmith Terrace, but notoriously the two men fell out over ownership of their typeface, and their relationship ended quite spectacularly with Cobden-Sanderson hurling all the metal type off Hammersmith Bridge during a series of clandestine night walks.

Mudlarkers still regularly find surviving pieces of the type at low tide, which have been put on display.

The house will reopen to the public on Thursday 5 March. Plans for this year include textile tours each month from March to October, an Open Garden in June and Open House in September.

On display will be several portraits of Walker with seldom-seen items from the house’s archives and poignant gifts and mementoes from his illustrious circle of friends, which included George Bernard Shaw as well as William Morris.

emerywalker.org.uk

Hand-embroidered textiles in one of the bedrooms