Eventually it reached the "masses" via commercial mass-production, and equally served to point the way to the Modem Movement through the work of Voysey, Mackintosh, and Frank Lloyd Wright.

"Arts and Crafts" takes the three main elements of the movement - design, production, and politics - and traces them across a century, from the birth of Ruskin in 1819 to the foundation of the Weimar Bauhaus by Gropius in 1919. But a more significant starting date is 1851, when the17 year old Morris visited the Great Exhibition at the Crystal Palace and was supposedly nauseated by its tastelessness and materialistic standpoint. Despite this, and despite Morris' firm belief that art was "handcuffed" by the system of capital labour, the Great Exhibition is seen by the authors as giving importance for the first time to "the familiar and domestic design of the nation".

The next year the Working Men's College was founded in London's East End by Frederick Maurice, who attracted Ruskin to teach drawing and design. He in turn encouraged Rossetti and Madox Brown to teach there and soon the East End was swarming with Pre- Raphaelities defining what the working class had to do to emancipate itself. It was at first a social and spiritual, not aesthetic, movement; but that was soon to change.

Morris and Company started business in 1861. Everything was made by hand, wallpapers, fabrics, and furniture, and its enormous impact on design was reinforced by Morris's own lectures on craft techniques. The most successful of all the craft firms and guilds, it lasted until 1940 but was criticised by Arthur Mackmurdo for producing much of its work for the rich. Schemes for St James Palace, Jesus College Chapel or Queen's College Hall at Cambridge had moved well away from Morris' original concept of simple, well-made goods for everyone.

The arch proponents of the Arts and Crafts ideal, Morris and Charles Ashbee of the Guild of Handicraft, took the flame to America. America accepted the new aesthetic ecstatically and ditched all the Ruskin sociology. After all, craft communities already existed in the form of Quaker settlements. While Morris was influencing Louis Tiffany's glass designs that were later to come under the blanket title of Art Nouveau, Ashbee was making friends with Frank Lloyd Wright. At their first meeting Wright declared: "My God is machinery, and the art of the future will be the expression of the individual artist through the thousand powers of the machine." Hardly on a par with Ashbee's commitment to the worker craftsman, and in spite of the fact that Wright had joined the Chicago Arts and Crafts Society in 1898.

By this time the movement in Britain was either dying or selling out to commercialism. In 1903 Ashbee wrote in despair: "Have we been deluding ourselves all these years thinking we were doing any sort of good work? Will two or three years see us out? Is it all going to bust?" Indeed his own guild went bust in 1907, by which time much popular "craft work" was sold through concerns such as Liberty's and Heal's. The authors describe Arthur Liberty's attitude as a "plagiarism of the craft ideal" but admit that "the wide success of the Liberty venture ensured that the public at large came to know the works of the Arts and Crafts designers, albeit in a modified form." By using the machinery that Morris despised, the price of craft goods was brought down to reasonable levels.

Charles Rennie Mackintosh, regarded by the authors as Wright's equivalent on this side of the Atlantic, was meanwhile transmuting Voysey's Arts and Crafts concepts, together with those of the Vienna Decorative School, into his extraordinary series of Glasgow tea-rooms. Interestingly these were another attempt at social reform - the preventing of daytime drunkenness - which largely failed. But, say the authors, Rennie's exaggeration of forms led him to the cultural dead end of Art Nouveau while Wright, who had reached very similar solutions, was not so diverted in his progression towards "Modern Style".

One more variation on the theme remained to be tried, and in 1913 Roger Fry, a friend of Ashbee's, set up the Omega Workshops, with the help of Wyndham Lewis, Vanessa Bell, Duncan Grant, arid sundry others of the Bloomsbury set. Hardly a craft community, this, with the actual furniture- making contracted out to craftsmen. But it was true to Morris's ideal of having artists to design everyday objects.

Personality clashes and the Great War put paid to the Omega, and in 1915 the Government-backed Design and Industries Association was set up to promote British design with machine production accepted as essential. As designers defected to the DIA, the Arts and Crafts movement dissolved. As the authors conclude: "To look back now, the deepest aspirations of the movement are still to be attained.'"

Arts and Crafts in Britain and America by Isabelle Anscombe and Charlotte Gere. Academy Editions, £10.