New views
Jeremy Deller explores William Morris’s relationship with nature in The Art That Made Us: Rise of the Cities, on BBC iPlayer. bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/p0bvgvtm/art-that-made-us
Although a century and a half has passed since one of Britain’s most extraordinary cultural figures, William Morris, first trod through the village of Kelmscott – describing it in a letter to his business partner Charles Faulkner, as “a heaven on Earth” – it still feels like a tranquil haven blocking out the rest of the world.
At the end of a no-through road and set among flat fields bordering the River Thames, it is clear why Morris chose this pocket of West Oxfordshire as his country retreat from the noise and industrial turmoil of London. A dozen cows graze in a small pasture, bumping up against an old house; drystone walls frame neat gardens of old farmworkers’ cottages clustered around the medieval church. The only commotion is the whispering of treetops mingled with the trills and whistles of birds and