Ruskin

I had a reason for hunting out this particular photo in Keswick today and fortunately we missed the showers – it was a lovely, sunny afternoon by the Lake. I was also impressed with the flowers in the Park as I walked back into the town.

A lot of people will know exactly where this is – Friar’s Crag, Keswick – and I assume it has been blipped a few times. I wonder how many people know why it is there, and it is not just because John Ruskin remembered being taken to Friar’s Crag when he was a child, as it says on the stone. 

This morning I was reading about the Arts and Crafts Movement and it linked together things I already knew a bit about and some things I didn’t. It was Ruskin who inspired the Movement with his ideas about design and he had close links with Keswick because of this. 

He was concerned about the social and environmental impact of the factory-based system of production. He felt that people should be given the chance to engage directly with craft-based production and see an item through from start to finish. His ideas inspired his friend Canon Rawnsley of Keswick, who went on to found the Keswick School of Industrial Art.  Here people were taught many skills and created much fine work. I wrote about the School here, after having been to a talk at Keswick Museum. The Museum has a collection of the work produced and other pieces have become collector’s items and are scattered round the world. 

In many ways the School was closer to Ruskin’s ideals, and the Arts and Crafts Movement itself, than were the fine houses in Cumbria, including his own at Brantwood. 

Interesting that, in our highly technological age, the idea of craftwork, making something with one’s hands, is becoming very popular. Perhaps creating/making things is again being seen as something good for people and society.