On Sunday morning I went on a casual search for Bert Irvine’s studio which I knew had been on Stepney Green in a Jewish School – I assume the old Stepney Jewish Primary and Infants School on the south end of the old village green which was converted into municipal gardens in 1872.   Instead, I found myself inspecting the back façade of Stepney Green Court next door, a noble set of artisans’ dwellings, designed by Solomon Joseph and built in 1895.   I’ve photographed the ironwork detailing on the street front before, but I haven’t previously appreciated the scale of the buildings in two parallel lines off the street:-

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Walthamstow Town Hall looks uncannily like the Boijmans Museum, belonging to the same family of 1930s Scandinavian, stripped-down, civic classicism.    It was designed by Philip Dalton Hepworth who had been a student at the AA, had designed war memorials in the 1920s, and won the competition in 1932.   It opened in 1941.   Yesterday there was a rather wonderful Indian wedding, complete with horse and carriage:-

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In the William Morris Gallery I noticed the frontispiece of C.R. Ashbee’s pamphlet An Endeavour towards the Teaching of John Ruskin and William Morris, which was published by the Essex House Press in 1901, employing workers and equipment from the Kemscott Press which closed in 1898.   Its frontispiece is Essex House itself, which was immediately opposite Mile End tube station:-

After walking in Epping Forest, we stopped off at the William Morris Gallery, which occupies Water House, the third house that Morris lived in in Walthamstow, after being born in Elm House in 1834, then moving to Woodford Hall in 1840, and to Elm House in 1847, following the death of his father.   I hadn’t been there since the exceptionally intelligent redisplay by Pringle, Richards, and Sharratt, which – deservedly – won Museum of the Year Award.   This was a detail of the wood carving on a Morris and Company bench:-

A detail of his sample books:-

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After the glories of the trees in Devon last weekend, we decided this weekend to explore Epping Forest, that area of ancient woodland which connects Chingford to Theydon Bois.   We parked on Golding’s Hill and found it surprisingly easy to get lost in the rides through the woodland copses:-

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