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13 May 2022 | |
News |
Those of you watching BBC2's documentary 'Art That Made Us' last night might also have spotted Alistair Petrie's appearance to read the words from William Cobbett's 1830 book 'Rural Rides'. Leaning against a gate with a field behind he read 'The woods, the hedgerows, the turnips, the tears, the fallows, the sheep folds and flocks. With every turn of the head a fresh set of these, which I at any rate, could look at forever.' Cobbett laments the loss of the rural way of living and creates an era of nostalgia in his writing.
Petrie was not the only Bradfieldian link in this programme. William Morris too was mentioned, credited with attempting to break the gloom of Victorian urban living through the introduction of beautiful patterns of nature into the design of everyday objects such as wallpaper, furniture and the perhaps not so everyday stained glass. Morris was friends with the painter Edward Burne Jones, examples of whose stained glass windows can be seen at Bradfield. Whilst William Morris himself was a Malburian, his grandson William Morris was a member of G House in the 1950s.