Campden Voices 

by Judith Ellis, 13 June, 2006

The Trustees report:
Things are going to be busy in Church Street for the next twelve months or so. The Heritage Lottery Fund is generously funding two-thirds of the cost of the Guild of Handicrafts plans for Court Barn. The simple old barn will be transformed, without any substantial change to its structure or external appearance, into a museum of local craftsmanship and design from the ars and crafts movement onwards.

We shall set out to tell the story of craftsmanship and design in the North Cotswolds as it has unfolded since about 1900. This is one of the things the Trust was set up to do, the others being to care for the surviving work and papers of designers and craftspeople and to promote modern work in a similar spirit.

But you can tell a story in all sorts of ways, and when we got down to the detailed planning of the exhibition about two years ago we asked ourselves what our special aims should be. The answers were:

1. To encourage a sense of space, to show how well our story of twentieth-century craft sits in the Cotswold landscape and its building traditions.
2. To show work of quality.
3. To give a sense of people’s lives.
4. To fit all this into 72 square metres.

In the end we have chosen nine individuals or workshops, and the exhibition will feature the work of:
• C R Ashbee and the Guild of Handicraft
• Katharine Adams – bookbinder
• Paul woodroffe – Book illustrator and stained-glass artist
• F L Griggs – artist and champion of Campden’s old buildings
• Alec Miller – woodcarver and scultor
• Gordon Russell – furniture designer and manufacturer
• Winchcombe Pottery
• The Hart family of silversmiths
• Robert Welch – silversmith and industrial designer.

We need to show a representative selection of their work and we welcome any loans of items by these artists for our exhibition.

Every month we shall show more of our development of the Court Barn – we welcome any information, memories or offers of loans for the exhibition.