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Arts and Crafts revealed in the Lake District.
(Published in The Sunday Times, 8.7.01, as “Lakes or Break”) The Lake District needs help. Agriculture and tourism have been hammered by the effects of the foot-and-mouth crisis. It’s “open for business”, as they say, but people aren’t returning fast enough. Now an unexpected saviour has emerged: a previously neglected arts-and-crafts mansion near Windermere, restored and reopened as a contemporary art gallery. They expect a relatively modest 40,000 visitors a year, maximum. It deserves more than that. Blackwell, as the house is called, was completed in 1900 as a country retreat for the family of a Manchester industrialist. The Lake District was quite an outpost of the Arts and Crafts movement at the time: they had Ruskin-inspired quasi-medieval craft guilds turning out excellent furniture and metalware, while rich clients got in architects such as Voysey to build their houses. This one, however, was different. Blackwell was designed by an Arts and Crafts individualist of the first order: Mackay Hugh Baillie Scott. Who, despite his tartan name, was born in Kent.
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