Fleur Elkerton is a Design Historian, co-founder of Design in Quarantine (@Design_inQ) and Digital Producer at David Parr House. She tweets at @Fleur_Elkerton.
In 1886, 186 Gwydir Street was bought by David Parr, a working-class Victorian decorative artist who worked for the Cambridge firm of artworkmen, F R Leach & Sons. David Parr learnt his many skills there, painting houses and churches with designs created by some of the best architects and designers in the country, including George Frederick Bodley, William Morris and Charles Eamer Kempe.
Over 40 years, David Parr decorated his own terraced home in the style of the grand interiors he worked on every day. His house became a pattern book of the work of late 19th century masters, including William Morris, perfectly crafted and painted with care. In 1912, David Parr inscribed ‘If you do anything, do it well’ in his house, and his patterned, hand-painted walls are a testament to that maxim and to the values of the Arts & Crafts movement in general.
The Arts & Crafts movement was a reaction to industrialisation, to big business and mechanisation. The decorative arts and craftsmanship were ways of reconnecting people to the places they lived and worked. David Parr’s home can also be considered an expression of the wider neo-Gothic movement which valued the highly decorative and the domestic but which is usually found in churches and large houses around the country. What is unique is to find David Parr’s skill and artistry hidden in such a humble location, one that expresses so perfectly the ethos of the movement that he was working within – it’s a real find.
What is also impressive is that, thanks to David Parr’s family, this work survived intact for so many decades and was not lost when he died. When David passed away in 1927, and his granddaughter, Elsie, moved into the house to keep her grandmother company. Elsie lived in the house for the next 85 years, with her husband Alfred Palmer, raising their two daughters. They were careful custodians of the house, only making minor changes and preserving David’s work, their family life taking place within the extraordinary legacy her grandfather left behind.
Elsie’s is a vibrant presence inside the house that she looked after for so many years and many of her objects spark unexpected memories in visitors as they pass through the house. Her artefacts are lightly imposed on the fabric of the house; a coat still hangs in the hallway, the mangle still stands in the kitchen and her wedding photo is framed on the wall – it is as if Elsie has just walked out of the front door.
A charity was founded to preserve the space in 2014, and the house underwent cohesive conservation, only opening to the public in 2019. David Parr House is a space that has unique layers of history from the last 125 years, encompassing social, art and design history.
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The Victorianist: BAVS Postgraduates 