Plaque on the garden wall
Philip Speakmann Webb
1859-60
Red brick and tiling
Morris's Red House
Bexleyheath, Greater London
The blue plaque for Red House is on the original red-brick garden wall, beside the gate. As it says, Morris only spent five years at Red House, but it was so important to him, and to his career. It was the need to furnish it that inspired him "to found the interior design firm that bears his name" (Red House 3); while the house itself, "a complex fusion of Morris's romantic utopianism and Webb's practical common sense" (Red House 7), remains to this day a huge and enduring influence on domestic architecture in Britain.