The William Morris Society runs a small museum in the Coach House and basement of Kelmscott House. The rest of the house is privately owned and not open to the public.
William Morris (24 March 1834 – 3 October 1896) was a revolutionary force in Victorian Britain: his work as an artist, designer, craftsman, writer and socialist dramatically changed the fashions and ideologies of the era.
As a young man he lived in Bloomsbury and had a house in Kent and a rural retreat in Oxfordshire, Kelmscott Manor. He moved to Kelmscott House by the Thames in 1878, when he was 44, and the Coach House became the meeting place of the Hammersmith Socialist League. He lived at this house until his death in 1896, his last years devoted to the Kelmscott Press, which he founded in 1891, to publish limited-edition illustrated books.
The William Morris Society holds seasonal exhibitions, talks and workshops but there is also a small permanent exhibition, including a reference library and Morris’s original Albion printing press used in the production of the Kelmscott Press Chaucer, Morris’s last great creation.
