The Simple Life

A new, regular slot in which we pick out some of the supporting material around books, to be found in our Faber Finds Archive. Faber Finds is our POD list, which sees a return to print for some great titles. We’ve already put over 600 books back into print, and the number is increasingly steadily.

Fiona MacCarthy

Here former Guardian design correspondent and acclaimed biographer Fiona MacCarthy discusses the ambitious social experiment which formed the basis of her debut book, The Simple Life. She explains the drive to set up an experimental artistic community – an exodus of skilled craftsmen and designers from London’s East End to the idyllic Cotswolds, led by C. R. Ashbee – and analyses its success and legacy.

Why I Wrote ‘The Simple Life’

I remember my own first sight of Chipping Campden back in the 1960s. The long curve of the high street; the mellowed grey stone houses; the church with its tall tower of surprising scale and splendour, reminding one that this had once been an important centre of the wool trade; the fantastically gabled and pillared market hall standing strangely isolated like a bizarre island in the middle of the street. This is still the most beautiful small town in the Cotswolds. Even now, on an early summer evening when the tourists have receded, it retains its ancient magic and you see it much as C. R. Ashbee and his guild of craftsmen would have seen it when they first arrived in Chipping Campden from the East End of London in that hopeful early summer of 1902.

The story of Ashbee’s exodus from London in search of an idyllic way of working in the countryside became the subject of my first book, The Simple Life. I was at that time the Guardian’s design correspondent, already fascinated with creative life and motivation, why exactly works of art and craft turn out the way they do, and I found the romantic impulses behind Ashbee’s flight to the Cotswolds with his skilled craftsmen, their wives and children – in all 150 people – not only intellectually interesting but also very moving. The attempt to create an Edwardian Utopia in a small town in the Cotswolds, putting William Morris’s ideals into actual practice, was brave to the point of recklessness.

The Simple Life

The idea of handmaking was central to the project. I found this sympathetic and familiar. My own husband had trained as a silversmith. The members of Ashbee’s Guild of Handicraft arrived with their tools of specialist trades; jewellery, silvers, enamelling, ironwork, furniture making, fine printing. They set up their workshops in a by then redundant silk mill. At the forefront of Ashbee’s thinking was the concept of social regeneration, of achieving a more balanced, democratic and more natural way of combining work and leisure than was possible in the squalid cramped conditions of London’s East End. There was an attractive element of mysticism. Things made in a beautiful rural setting would be more likely to turn out beautiful themselves.

One of the things I loved about the subject was the element of comedy. The simple collision of the country folk and cockneys who colonized the village. The social manoeuvrings within the workshops with their mixture of artisans and middle class idealists imbued with Ruskinian principles about destructive divisions in society caused by separating the ‘workers’ from the ‘thinkers’. In Ashbee’s Utopia workers and thinkers merged, playing in the village band, acting in the annual Guild plays, taking part in the Guild sing-songs, bathing naked in the bathing lake.

Ashbee was himself homosexual, though married, a disciple of the pioneering gay liberationist Edward Carpenter. One of the most intriguing elements of the story of the Guild in Chipping Campden is the quiet but insistent homoeroticism. This is something I would have made more of had I been writing The Simple Life today.

For me as a biographer many of the themes I first discovered in C. R. Ashbee’s story lingered in my mind. It was a fortunately rich beginning that led me on to books on Eric Gill and William Morris and the biography I am just completing, a life of Edward Burne-Jones. I still find the idea of experimental artistic communities entrancing. Next I plan to write a book on Gropius, the Bauhaus and the hopes of building a modernist new world.

More generally, since the Ashbee book was published, the instincts behind the exodus to Chipping Campden a century ago have recently been reawakened. We are now experiencing a rather similar search for an authentic way of life as people question the costs of the unbridled and unprincipled global expansion of recent years. Some of us have been returning to an ‘elemental’ mode, seeing the value of taking things more slowly, appreciating our own local countryside, retrieving our almost forgotten human skills of craftsmanship. We are even (like Ashbee’s craftsmen) tending our allotments. To a surprising extent the human longing for a simpler life lives on.

– Fiona MacCarthy

You can buy a copy of The Simple Life from the Faber Finds website.

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