Page 168 - Constructing Craft

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resettled in villages and the economy return[ed] to craft workshops and guilds.’ The
largely middle-class group of people who made up the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement,
a loose confederation of like-minded groups, considered this solution radical without

being revolutionary. The solution appealed to liberal thinkers of the time because it
appeared to offer change without the fear of the mob that terrified Victorian society.

The people most closely involved in the movement, and the early twentieth century
variations of it, were the group that Pierre Bourdieu would later identify as those

who valued cultural and symbolic capital the most, having already inherited

economic capital. They were ‘the children of the suburbs … the sons, and especially
the daughters of those who worked in the professions, the finance houses or the

upper reaches of the civil service, … who had no pressing need for employment
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themselves.’ Meanwhile the working-class had no such interest in returning to a
rural environment that had little to offer them.

The Arts and Crafts Movement and the Rural Ideal

An example of the close association between the ‘back-to-the-land’ movement and

craft was the community founded by Robert Charles Ashbee, a leader in the Arts
and Crafts movement, at Chipping Campden in Gloucester in 1902. The formation

of the community in the rural Cotswolds was part of an experiment to fight urban

poverty. In 1888 Ashbee had established the Guild of Handcraft in Whitechapel in
London as a practical expression of the aims of the Settlement movement of which

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he was a member. The workers and members of the Guild were self-taught – a
method that Ashbee endorsed as more beneficial than art schools and trade
training. He set about promoting his belief in the teaching of the ‘three Hs’ of ‘Hand,
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Heart and Head’ – a theme that became the motto of later craftspeople, including
Bernard Leach. The twin aims of the Guild, as it was of the Arts and Crafts

Movement in general, were to improve both the quality of craft and the working lives
of craftspeople (usually craftsmen). The move to the country was a means for

craftsmen and their families to live a more fulfilling life.

Constructing Craft