This is a manuscript of a review accepted for publication in the Journal of William Morris Studies. The definitive version can be seen in the Journal of William Morris Studies Vol. XXII, no 2 www.morrissociety.org/publications/journal.html Life and Art at The David Parr House. The David Parr House is a short walk from the centre of Cambridge along Mill Road. Just before the railway bridge you take a right at Gwydir Street. Within a few yards at no. 186 can be seen a small, neat, freshly painted terraced house. A bright white sign attached to the front wall says ‘Life and Art in a Worker’s House’ (Figure 1).

I was interested to see the house after reading reviews before its recent reopening after a two-and-a-half-year conservation and stabilisation project. Here designs and materials created for the upper middle classes by Morris & Co and other late 19th and early 20th C Arts and Crafts designers and craftsman had been appropriated by a skilled decorator for their own small terraced house. Could there be something Morrisian about a worker ‘doing it’ for himself? The David Parr House seemed to offer the possibility of at least a partial bridging of the gap between William Morris’ mature Communist politics and Morris & Co’s business in actually existing late-nineteenth-century Capitalism.

On my arrival I was greeted by Tamsin Wimhurst who opened the front door into the hall, ushered me into the drawing room, instructed me to sit in one of three armchairs – the others chairs had an assortment of covers and embroidered cushions on them – and began to tell me the David Parr story. Parr was employed as a decorator for the Cambridge firm of F.R. Leach and Son. The firm worked with many of the major architects and craftsmen of the time, including George Frederick Bodley, William Morris and Charles Eamer Kempe. David Parr bought the house in 1886 and for over forty years lived in and decorated his home, dying in 1927. After Parr’s death his granddaughter Elsie Palmer moved in the house, initially looking after her grandmother. Palmer continued to live in the house for the next 85 years until she moved into a care home in 2012. Tamsin Wimshurst first saw the David Parr House in 2009, eventually buying it with her partner Mike Muller and transforming it into a charity in 2014. Wimshurst is now chair of the trustees.

The house is a fairly conventional “two up two down” Victorian type brick terrace with a small extended back section. On the ground floor it has an entrance hall running from the front door into the dining room and kitchen past the staircase up to the first floor, with the drawing room off to the right. The upstairs has a bathroom at the top of the stairs, under the eaves of the extension, and originally two bedrooms. The bedroom at the back was Elsie Palmer’s and her husband’s. The front bedroom was divided to make two smaller bedrooms and a sort of lobby.

The visitor centre opened in May 2019 and occupies the house next door at 184 Gwydir Street, but when I visited, the visitor centre had yet to open, and the souvenir guide book written by David Parr’s great-great-granddaughter Anna Norman had yet to arrive. There were no labels, wall texts or leaflets in any of the rooms, and nor are there going to be. Instead, the visitor is led through the house on a tour, providing a constantly evolving narrative context and dialogue between the guide and the visitor, and special thanks go to Tasmin Wimhurst, who provided me with the tour. Much of what we discussed appears in this review article.

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that the contents of the rooms span from the 1880s through to the 1980s. Most of the house and rooms haven’t been “restored” to a certain period; instead the project has been to conserve what existed, interestingly along the lines of Morris’ original idea for SPAB. This conservation is carried out fairly consistently across the house, and indeed the house works best where this principle is rigorously applied, and where no sanitizing of the past takes place. What occurs is a layering of one history on, in and around another. One life, that of Elsie Palmer, is nested inside another, that of David Parr –although it’s not exactly Parr’s life as much as his decorative interior which Palmer’s everyday life has been layered upon.

The Parr house has none of the calm stability that one can experience in visiting large houses previously belonging to the upper middle or ruling class. Instead there are exhilarating juxtapositions of scale, resulting from large decorative designs being embedded within such small rooms.

There are also strange juxtapositions of decorations and objects from different moments in design and cultural history – but many of these result not from David Parr’s original decoration but from the continued interventions into the house’s visual dynamic by Elsie Palmer and presumably her family.

In presenting Palmer’s lived reality embedded and entwined within Parr’s vibrant decorative appropriation, the visitor is given a feeling of being transported into an often cosy but simultaneously unstable world of possibility. Rather than the visitor passively receiving a distanced, hermetically sealed lost past, the Parr House asks us to think of ourselves within a constantly evolving past that we both belong to and will continue to be part of. The house suggests that rather than the past being fixed, the past was and continues to be malleable, and that the visitor contributes to this by their presence; or to quote Morris’s Preface to Robert Steele’s Medieval Lore (1893): ‘the past is not dead, but is living in us, and will be alive in the future which we are now helping to make. David Mabb