Red House & William Morris

BCS has, throughout its existence, been closely associated with Red House, not least because it was home to two of the Society's most active members, Ted and Doris Hollamby. Many of the Society's Committee meetings and two successful Garden Parties were held in those evocative surroundings.

Red House is one of the Borough's four Grade I listed buildings and the Red House site and neighbouring Hogs Hole Cottages were designated a Conservation Area in 1973.

In 1996 the William Morris Society, supported by the National Trust, founded the charitable Red House Trust to secure the long-term future of the house with its garden and orchard setting. Shortly afterwards BCS played a prominent part in forming the Friends of Red House to complement the management, education and funding activities of the Trust and to give practical aid to the task of maintaining the fabric of the house and gardens. BCS sponsored the first meeting of the new organisation in 1998 which had initially attracted 60 or so members of the Society and others from outside. By the following year it was beginning to organise social activities for its growing membership and produced its first Newsletter.

BCS's association with Red House naturally extended to a particular interest in William Morris. The Society organised a very successful Exhibition and Garden Party at Red House in July 1977 to mark Jubilee Year. In 1996 it proposed to the Council that the centenary of Morris's death in 1896 should be marked by the establishment of a memorial orchard at the foot of Knee Hill on the route he once used to take by pony trap from Abbey Wood station to Red House. Exhibitions were also held that year at Crayford Silk Mills and Hall Place and the Council commissioned a bust of Morris to be placed in the Bexleyheath Clock Tower paid for by the Bexley Heritage Fund and public contributions. The bust was unveiled early in 1997 after a centenary year of unprecedented national interest in Morris's life and work. BCS part-funded a permanent memorial to him on the Knee Hill site. A design was chosen in 2000 and it was put in place in 2001.

Bexley Civic Society