Guild and School of Handicraft

The Guild and School of Handicraft was established in 1888 in London, later moving to Chipping Campden in Gloucestershire, England, as a community of artists and craftspeople by the arts and crafts architect Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942).

According to the Chipping Campden History Society, the movement "focused on handmade objects, reacting against the rapidly growing dominance of machinery which resulted in the loss of craft skills".

To this end it endeavours to steer a mean between the independence of the artist— which is individualistic and often parasitical— and the trade-shop, where the workman is bound to purely commercial and antiquated traditions, and has, as a rule, neither stake in the business nor any interest beyond his weekly wage.

In 1902 Ashbee relocated the guild out of London to begin an experimental community in the old silk mill in Sheep Street, Chipping Campden in the picturesque Cotswolds in Gloucestershire.

A widely illustrated suite of furniture was made by the Guild to designs of M. H. Baillie Scott for Ernest Louis, Grand Duke of Hesse at Darmstadt.