A room filled with enough floral print patterns to set off a bad case of hay fever is currently showing off how contemporary designers tap into a long-dead Victorian artist’s vision for the home.

William Morris was an English textile designer and socialist activist associated with the British Arts and Crafts movement, which rejected mass production in favour of handcrafts for home decoration. At a time when Victorian homes were increasingly cluttered, his gothic-revival inspired designs were still fairly fussy but also paired with a minimalist approach to household clutter.

I have a bit of a problem with William Morris, in that yes it’s nice to support the crafts, but there’s a reason why mass production is good — it makes things affordable. Morris’s vision was great for the upper middle classes who could afford hand-printed wallpapers and the like, but the working classes had no way of affording what Morris thought they should be buying.

He also lauded the dignity of human labour as a craftsman’s skill to be encouraged but overlooked the fact that, frankly, most of us are lousy craftsmen, and a machine can do the job far better than we can. I also find it slightly awkward that the man lauding the labouring classes was himself a wealthy middle-class intellectual, and it all feels somewhat patronising.

That aside, he was a good designer and a skilled businessman who brought together a small team of like-minded designers. Although the firm didn’t last beyond 1940, its legacy has left a profound influence down the decades.

To explore that legacy, the William Morris Gallery has brought together a range of modern interpretations of the Morris style.

Whether actual Morris prints are repurposed or inspired by the concepts they created, there’s a range of the expected and unexpected here. So yes to the obvious — the clothes, the wallpapers, the handbags — but also yes to a Brompton Bike, shopping trolley and even a floral Japanese Waving Cat (Maneki-neko).

However, the range of AI-generated posters will challenge William Morris’s idea of promoting the dignity of manual labour.

There’s also a 30-minute film showing other films where Morris designs were included in the sets. Information boards explain the timeline, and quite a lot of attention is given to how museums promoted Morris designs, thanks to the rise of the museum shop selling mass-produced (!) Morris-inspired products.

I have an inkling that William Morris would hate the museum shop, but what they sell is affordable to the average visitor, and museums need the income from the shop. Sorry Will.

The signs say the exhibition continues upstairs, but unless I missed something, the only thing I saw that might have been new were the wallpaper panels on the landing. The main temporary exhibition is on the ground floor.

The exhibition proper is only one room, but the rest of the museum is always worth visiting (repeatedly) for the Morris story, and they always seem to have one of the busiest museum cafes you will ever visit.

The exhibition Morris Mania: How Britain’s greatest designer went viral is at the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow until late September 2025.

Entry to the museum is free.

It’s open daily from 10am to 5pm, except on Mondays.