Gimson in London

Raymond Buildings from Gray's Inn Gardens

Ernest Gimson moved to London from Leicester early in 1886. By March he was settled in lodgings in Lady Margaret’s Road, Kentish Town and working in the office of John Sedding. The office was in Oxford Street next door to the showrooms of Morris and Company which Gimson described as ‘a treasure house for anyone furnishing’. He lived on a tight budget and in order to buy books he developed, ‘a plan of saving 12s [12 shillings/60p] per week by dispensing with buses and trains and dining off buns’. Among the books was reading at this time was ‘The Earthly Paradise’, William Morris’s prose romance first published in 1868.

In London he made contact with Clara Collet, his friend from Leicester who had moved back to London the previous year. Gimson would play billiards and whist with the Collet family and also accompanied them to political meetings. In September 1887 he was living in digs in Notting Hill and he stayed in that area until the beginning of 1891 when he moved to rooms in Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Gimson shared these rooms with Sidney Barnsley and their mentor, the architect Philip Webb, lived in the same building. Alfred Powell recalled that:

‘…it was wonderful in old smoky London to find yourself in those fresh, clean rooms, furnished with good oak furniture and a trestle table that at seasonable hours surrendered its drawing boards to a good English meal, in which figured, if I remember right, at least on guest nights, a great stone jar of the best ale.’