Charles Robert Ashbee
Founder of the Guild of Handicraft.
Charles Robert Ashbee founded the Guild of Handicraft in London's East End in 1888 and moved the guild to Chipping Campden in 1902 – one of the movement's best-known attempts to unite craft and community. His silverwork is elegant and simple.
Charles Robert Ashbee was born in 1863 in Isleworth outside London. His father was a wealthy businessman and book collector. Ashbee studied history at King's College, Cambridge, and then trained as an architect under George Frederick Bodley. He was strongly influenced by John Ruskin, William Morris and the socialist Edward Carpenter.
For a time he lived at Toynbee Hall, a settlement in London's poor East End, where he started an evening school for crafts. Out of it grew the Guild of Handicraft in 1888, a guild in which craftsmen worked together on silver, jewellery, furniture and bookbinding. In 1902 the guild moved, with some hundred people including families, to the small country town of Chipping Campden. It was one of the movement's best-known attempts to unite work, craft and community.
Ashbee's silverwork is among the finest of the Arts and Crafts movement. It is hand-hammered, giving the surface a soft sheen, and decorated with enamel, semi-precious stones and characteristic handles bent from thin wire. The guild also ran a press, the Essex House Press, which took over equipment from Morris's Kelmscott Press. The experiment at Chipping Campden did not pay its way, however, and the guild was wound up in 1907–08.
In 1898 Ashbee married Janet Forbes. He was homosexual, and the couple had an unconventional marriage but had four daughters. He became friends with the American architect Frank Lloyd Wright. After the First World War he worked as civic adviser in Jerusalem under the British Mandate, where he led the restoration of the Old City.
Ashbee died in 1942. He was also one of the founders of the Survey of London, a major inventory of the city's buildings that is still in progress. His silver is in the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a museum in Chipping Campden tells the story of the guild. His ideas about craft and community have inspired later designers and social movements.