Voysey House, Barley Mow Passage, Chiswick W4 4DS
7.30pm Monday 27 October 2025
Tickets £15 (+ admin fee) to include a glass of wine or soft drink. Doors open at 7pm – SOLD OUT!
The Bedford Park Society and Chiswick Book Festival invite you to an event marking 150 years of the founding of both Bedford Park and Liberty & Co in Voysey House, by kind permission of Sanderson Design Group.
Anna Buruma, who managed the Liberty textile archive for over 25 years, will explore how the name of Liberty became synonymous with Aestheticism and the English Art Nouveau Movement, and its role in shaping contemporary late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Artistic Dress. The early residents of Bedford Park were customers of Liberty from the outset.
Liberty’s dress department was opened in 1884, headed by Edward William Godwin, who was one of Bedford Park’s founding architects and also successful in furniture design and decoration, theatre and costume design and writing.
From the mid-nineteenth century, women fought against restrictive clothing such as tight-laced corsets and heavy petticoats, which were harmful to their health, and chose instead to dress in looser fitting dresses, coloured with natural dyes and ornamented with embroidery and needlework. Liberty & Co was at the forefront of the development of artistic dress.
Anna’s recently published book Artistic Dress at Liberty & Co will be available for signing by the author on the night and will be available for sale through Waterstones Chiswick at the event.
Notes for editors
Anna Buruma trained as a theatre designer and had a successful career as a costume designer in television and film before completing an MA, specializing in the History of Dress, at the Courtauld Institute of Art. Buruma managed and catalogued the textile archive at Liberty from 1996 to 2022. From 2005 she has also been a part-time museum curator at Central Saint Martins. With archival materials and previously unpublished pattern books, Anna Buruma navigates Liberty’s role in artistic dress.
Elfrida Ionides (1848-1929) was a wealthy patron and art collector. The top image shows her in a typical Aesthetic dress: puffed sleeves with embroidery around the neck and upper arms. Portrait by Sir William Blake Richmond, Mrs Luke Ionides, Victoria & Albert Museum. Elfrida and Luke Ionides were friendly with Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones and a host of other Pre-Raphaelites, all natural customers of Liberty’s.
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Edward William Godwin (1833-1886) was the first head of Liberty & Co’s dress department and one of the founding architects of Bedford Park. Because of his association with the actress Ellen Terry, with whom he lived for six years, he was greatly interested in all aspects of the theatre. This theatrical interest was also shared by their two children, both of whom Terry reared: Edith Ailsa Craig (1869–1947), who was an active theatre director and costumier, as well as a suffragist, and Edward Gordon Craig, a noted stage designer. At Liberty & Co, his clients included Oscar Wilde.
Tickets £15 (+ admin fee) to include a glass of wine or soft drink. Doors open at 7pm – SOLD OUT!
