On 5 October 2024 12:00-1:30pm
The William Morris Society invites you to join David Saxby, Senior Archaeologist for Museum of London Archaeology, for a tour of Merton Abbey, site of the Morris & Co. works for sixty years.
In 1881 Morris moved his workshop from cramped quarters in Queen Square, Bloomsbury to a seven-acre 18th-century fabric-printing works on the River Wandle in South London. There he established a dye-works, a stained-glass workshop, and facilities for producing carpets, tapestries, and printed and woven textiles.
The Morris & Co. works were replaced by a Sainsbury’s supermarket in the 1990s. However, a museum of artifacts is nearby, and another mill on the Wandle, which housed the Liberty & Co. fabric printing works until 1972, still stands and is part of the tour.
David Saxby led the team that conducted excavations on the site, which was first developed in the medieval period. Since then, he has published a history of Morris & Co. at Merton Abbey in addition to contributing multiple articles to the WMS Magazine.
Access requirements
Meet outside the Colliers Wood tube stop at noon.
