John Ruskin and Brantwood House 

Flick and I went down to the Lake District just before Christmas in 2015 to visit family.

The South lakes haven’t had quite the deluge that the unfortunate folk further North have suffered but it was still pretty wet. After a rather dreich walk up Coniston one morning we decided to visit Brantwood House, the home of John Ruskin from 1872 until his death in 1900. As a student at the Ruskin School of drawing in Oxford, I had learned a little about his championing of Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites and seen his wonderful pencil and watercolour studies of Nature; I was however unprepared for the breadth of his thinking that was outlined in the short film shown to visitors on their arrival. It seems that he was quite the visionary championing a minimum wage, social housing, health care, and a free trade area throughout Europe, sound familiar?!  Apparently, both Trotsky and the founding Fathers of the Labour Party read his philosophical writings. Beyond this he railed against the atmospheric pollution caused by those “Dark Satanic Mills” that drove the great nineteenth-century Industrial revolution belching out coal smoke across the continent. He observed the smog clouding and shortening the days and took precise measurements of rainfall, plants, and lichens at Brantwood fearing for the potential destruction of Natural systems. He studied Geology and collected many specimens of rocks and fossils. Much of his lifetime’s extraordinary work and legacy is on display at Brantwood House which still occupies a beautiful site above Coniston water.