William Morris named his fabrics after rivers. Wandle, Cray, Evenlode, Medway, Kennet, Windrush — tributaries of the Thames, given to printed cloth.
The Wandle was the most ambitious design he ever drew, and the way he spoke of it is worth pausing on. He would give the river its name only if the work turned out well enough to deserve it. The honour was not his to grant. It had to be earned by the thing he made.
And the river is small. He knew it. It is precisely because the Wandle is a modest stream, not a great one, that the design had to be elaborate and splendid. Worth is not measured against scale.
The reason the Wandle mattered to him is plain enough: its water was what made the dyeing possible. The colour came out of that stream. So the naming is not decoration, it is an act of grateful naming.
The work carrying the name of the condition that allowed it to exist. Which is a rarer gesture than it sounds. In the same century, the same river was being consumed by industries that used it without ever naming it.
We followed the Wandle ourselves, for a different material and a different reason, in issue 9 of Materia Viva, the independent ezine about aromatic materials and their environments.
