The 2011 postcode area is part of our early colony as an English convict camp. It enjoys examples of Georgian architecture such as Elizabeth Bay House. Victorian examples exist in Roslyn Gardens, Elizabeth Bay and Victoria Street, Potts Point. Later in the nineteenth century a “back-to-earth” style developed based on ancient traditional methods.

It was coined the Arts and Crafts movement and emerged from the attempt to reform design and decoration in mid-19th century Britain. It was a reaction against a perceived decline in standards that the reformers associated with machinery and factory production. Their critique was sharpened by the items that they saw in the Great Exhibition of 1851 which they considered to be excessively ornate, artificial, and ignorant of the qualities of the materials used. Art historian Nikolaus Pevsner writes that the exhibits showed “ignorance of that basic need in creating patterns, the integrity of the surface”, as well as displaying “vulgarity in detail”.Design reform began with Exhibition organisers Henry Cole (1808–1882), Owen Jones (1809–1874), Matthew Digby Wyatt (1820–1877), and Richard Redgrave (1804–1888), all of whom deprecated excessive ornament and impractical or badly made things.^] The organisers were “unanimous in their condemnation of the exhibits.”. Owen Jones, for example, complained that “the architect, the upholsterer, the paper-stainer, the weaver, the calico-printer, and the potter” produced “novelty without beauty, or beauty without intelligence.” From these criticisms of manufactured goods emerged several publications which set out what the writers considered to be the correct principles of design. Richard Redgrave’s Supplementary Report on Design (1852) analysed the principles of design and ornament and pleaded for “more logic in the application of decoration.” Other works followed in a similar vein, such as Wyatt’s Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century (1853).

By contrast, the Arts and Crafts movement was as much a movement of social reform as design reform, and its leading practitioners did not separate the two.

Some of the ideas of the movement were anticipated by A. W. N. Pugin (1812-1852), a leader in the Gothic revival in architecture. For example, he advocated truth to material, structure, and function, as did the Arts and Crafts artists. Pugin articulated the tendency of social critics to compare the faults of modern society with the Middle Ages, such as the sprawling growth of cities and the treatment of the poor,.

His book Contrasts (1836) drew examples of bad modern buildings and town planning in contrast with good medieval examples, and his biographer Rosemary Hill notes that he “reached conclusions, almost in passing, about the importance of craftsmanship and tradition in architecture that it would take the rest of the century and the combined efforts of Ruskin and Morris to work out in detail.” She describes the spare furnishings which he specified for a building in 1841, “rush chairs, oak tables”, as “the Arts and Crafts interior in embryo.”

The Arts and Crafts philosophy was derived in a large measure from John Ruskin’s social criticism, which relates the moral and social health of a nation to the qualities of its architecture and to the nature of its work.  Ruskin considered the sort of mechanised production and division of labour that had been created in the industrial revolution to be “servile labour” and thought that a healthy and moral society required independent workers who designed the things that they made.  He believed factory- made works to be “dishonest” and that handwork and craftsmanship merged dignity with labour.  His followers favoured craft production over industrial manufacture and were concerned about the loss of traditional skills, but they were more troubled by the effects of the factory system than by machinery itself.  William Morris’s idea of “handicraft” was essentially work without any division of labour rather than work without any sort of machinery.  Furniture and decorative objects were based on medieval styles and using bold forms and strong colours.  Patterns were based on flora and fauna, and his products were inspired by the vernacular or domestic traditions of the British countryside.  Some were deliberately left unfinished in order to display the beauty of the materials and simplicity of form.

22-24 Bayswater road Kings Cross and its buddy building illustrate these influences with their castellations, rustic facade and interior wooden elements.

Such examples are part of the continuing rich history of the area in the late 19th and early early 20th century.

By Andrew Woodhouse

Heritage Solutions