The radical William Morris fell in love with Kelmscott on his arrival by boat in 1871, writes CHRIS KOENIG

Perhaps no part of Oxfordshire has undergone less change than its western extremity, particularly that lonely reach of flat meadow, with the low hills of the Cotswolds around it, with which William Morris fell in love in 1871. But he would be astonished to see it now, all the same.

What, for instance, would he think of the quantities of cars which these days poke their way down narrow roads to the riverbank at Kelmscott, the house into which he moved that year?

Morris believed that the down-trodden poor, at that time suffering from the effects of the industrial revolution, which had driven millions out of the country and into the polluted towns, could be improved by surrounding them with beautiful and practical products of good workmanship.

Yet, of course, he would have hated cars, objects which he would surely have seen as destroyers of that natural world he loved.

The green message contained in his book News from Nowhere somehow strikes a doleful chord for any modern motorist arriving at Kelmscott with the belief that small is beautiful. The social reformer, poet, and design guru described a journey up the Thames from Oxford to Kelmscott: "The smallness of the scale is everything, the short reaches and the speedy change of the banks give one a feeling of going somewhere, of coming to something strange, a feeling of adventure which I have not felt in bigger waters."

Obviously no motorist could experience this feeling and anyone arriving by boat will be greeted by the sight of dozens of unnatural-looking cars!

Morris rented the Manor there that first year of 1871, together with fellow member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Later he bought the Elizabethan house, which he described as a "heaven on earth", and kept it as his country home until his death in 1896.

The 600 or so designs for wallpapers, fabrics and tapestries which he created are still among the nation's top sellers - and the harmony in the relationship between the man-made house and its natural surroundings influenced them.

For instance, he wrote of the tiled roof on the house: "It gives me the same sort of pleasure in their orderly beauty as a fish's scales or a bird's feathers." The guiding principle in the design of both house and garden was that nothing should be allowed to intrude that was not both beautiful and useful.

Nevertheless, the early years of Morris's life there were lived in a stormy state of continuously heightened emotion as part of a ménage à trois consisting of himself, his wife Jane and Rossetti, who painted the beautiful Jane so often that her whimsical look has become known as the 'Rossetti look'.

Jane Burdon was the daughter of an Oxford ostler. Her rags-to-riches story began when Rossetti spotted her in the audience at the theatre - a converted gymnasium in Oriel Street - and persuaded her to model for him. Then she met and married Morris.

Poor Rossetti became increasingly insane, and finally departed, leaving William and Jane Morris sad, disillusioned, but still convinced of the truth of their ideas.