Charles Robert Ashbee

Charles Robert Ashbee
An electric chandelier designed by Charles Robert Ashbee
Born	May 17, 1863 Isleworth, United Kingdom
Died	May 23, 1942 Sevenoaks, United Kingdom
Resting place	St Peter and St Paul Churchyard, Seal, Sevenoaks District, Kent, United Kingdom
Education	Wellington College, King's College, Cambridge

Charles Robert Ashbee (17 May 1863 – 23 May 1942) was an English designer and entrepreneur who was a prime mover of the Arts and Crafts movement that took its craft ethic from the works of John Ruskin and its co-operative structure from the socialism of William Morris.

Ashbee was born in 1863 in Isleworth, the son of businessman and erotic bibliophile Henry Spencer Ashbee. His Jewish mother developed suffragette views, and his well-educated sisters were progressive as well. Ashbee went to Wellington College and read history at King's College, Cambridge, from 1883 to 1886, and studied under the architect George Frederick Bodley.

Ashbee set up his Guild and School of Handicraft in 1888 in London, while a resident at Toynbee Hall, one of the original settlements set up to alleviate inner city poverty, in this case, in the slums of Whitechapel. The fledgling venture was first housed in temporary space but by 1890 had workshops at Essex House, Mile End Road, in the East End, with a retail outlet in the heart of the West End in fashionable Brook Street, Mayfair, more accessible to the Guild's patrons. The School closed in 1895, which Ashbee blamed on "the failure of the Technical Education Board of the L.C.C. to keep its word with the School Committee and the impossibility of carrying on costly educational work in the teeth of state aided competition." The following year the L.C.C. opened the Central School of Arts and Crafts. In 1902 the Guild moved to Chipping Campden, in the picturesque Cotswolds of Gloucestershire, where a sympathetic community provided local patrons, but where the market for craftsman-designed furniture and metalwork was saturated by 1905. The Guild was liquidated in 1907. One of Ashbee's pupils in Mile End was Frank Baines, later Sir Frank, who was enormously influential in keeping Arts and Crafts alive in 20th-century architecture.