RAWNSLEY

DEFENDER OF THE LAKES

The Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley exhibition celebrates a prolific author, poet and activist who had an opinion on everything and became known as “Defender of the Lakes”. 

He studied under Ruskin at Oxford and went to work in inner city housing projects in London with Octavia Hill, with whom he later co-founded the National Trust. He was involved with the Commons Preservation Society and Open Spaces Society with William Morris. He became Vicar at Wray, near Ambleside, in 1882. He met Beatrix Potter there and was a lifelong friend. His wife Edith Rawnsley is thought by many to be the true driving force behind the creation of a school of “industrial arts”, in Keswick, which served both to employ the unemployed and retain metalworking skills that were under assault from mass production.

While looking at the displays you might like to consider whether there is a difference between Rawnsley’s activism and Potter’s actions, and those of later environmentalists such as Greta Thunberg or the Extinction Rebellion movement? Rawnsley was a challenger and promoter of mass trespass and practical doer, but above all a pragmatist.

Can we compare a mass trespass on Latrigg with Extinction Rebellion’s “This land is our land” mass trespass project?
Can we compare their ideas that the world is in conflict between those that would exploit the planet for profit or preserve it, with Canon Rawnsley and Octavia Hill who sought to preserve common land for future generations and give effect in John Ruskin’s ideas more than a century ago?

Thanks go to Arts Council England for funding this exhibition, Price Walker Antiques of Keswick for object loans, Michael Allen for the video on Rawnsley, Rosalind Rawnsley for research and information on her great grandfather, HDR, and Maurice George for the accompanying booklet.