Watts & Co.

[1] It is a survivor from the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century: a firm founded in 1874 by three leading late-Victorian church architects – George Frederick Bodley, Thomas Garner and Gilbert Scott the younger – to produce furniture, textiles, stained glass windows, and needlework in a style distinctively their own.

The designs made by the founders for the firm were among the most original and distinctive of their time, rivalled only the work of Morris & Co., with whom Watts was in friendly competition.

Both were their inspiration and from such rich sources they produced designs of fertile invention in which the elaboration of detail is controlled by simplicity, strength and restraint, giving their work a timeless quality transcending period limitation.

In the late 1950s, Robert Maguire and Keith Murray broke new ground with their pioneering Church of St Paul, Bow Common, for which Watts executed the contemporary fittings.

The work of Stephen Dykes Bower, in Westminster Abbey, Bury St Edmunds Cathedral and elsewhere, is inextricably associated with Watt's textiles and embroidery.

Still in production, they have in recent years been used extensively in restoration work by the National Trust, in the Houses of Parliament, in colleges at Oxford and Cambridge, and by architects and decorators involved in the conservation of historic buildings.