Guild of St George

Constitution, 1878 - 1973 (GSG/1)

Minutes, 1879 - 1989 (GSG/2)

Annual reports of the Master of the Guild, 1884 - 1983 (GSG/3)

Correspondence, 1878 - 2009 (GSG/4)

Finance, 1853 - 1978 (GSG/5)

Property, 1857 - 1978 (GSG/6)

Victor Branford Trust Fund, c.1906 - 1981 (GSG/7)

Ruskin Linen Industry, Keswick, Cumbria, 1876 - 1936 (GSG/8)

Ruskin Collection in Sheffield, 1909 - 1979 (GSG/9)

Miscellaneous items, 1818 - 2006 (GSG/10)

Printed publications, 1890 - 1991 (GSG/11)

Photographic portraits, [1950s] (GSG/12)

Items less than 30 years old are restricted access. Please contact a member of staff for advice on accessing restricted items.

The Guild of St George is a charity for arts, craft and the rural economy, founded by John Ruskin in 1871. Ruskin announced the formation of St George's Company, as it was first called, in 1871, but it was not until 1878 that it was properly constituted and given the name 'Guild of St George'.

The original aim was to acquire land and, through labour, wind and water power, to bring it into useful production. Guild members (known as 'Companions'), supported Ruskin's aims with gifts of real estate and money. The Guild represented Ruskin's practical response to a society in which profit and mass-production seemed to be everything; beauty, goodness and ordinary happiness - nothing. Ruskin made it clear in a monthly series of 'Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain' called Fors Clavigera that the aim of the Guild was an ambitious one of making Britain a happier place to live in. 'I have listened to many ingenious persons,' he wrote, 'who say we are better off now than ever we were before' but 'we cannot be called, as a nation, well off, while so many of us are living... in... beggary.' In short, Ruskin was trying to 'establish a National Store instead of a National Debt' - an alternative to industrial capitalism. A co-operative farm was established near Sheffield; woodland was given in Bewdley, Worcestershire; and a number of houses in Wales. After Ruskin?s death, several properties in Hertfordshire were donated to the Guild, and a wildflower meadow in Gloucestershire. A linen industry was established at Keswick under the guidance of Marion Twelves which encouraged handicrafts such as hand-weaving of linen.

Ruskin's admiration for Sheffield's metalworkers led to the establishment of the Guild's first museum in the city. The St George's Museum opened in Walkley in 1875. The aim was to better the lot of the workmen who visited it. The small house was filled with commissioned copies of Old Master paintings, studies of architecture, geological specimens, casts of sculpture, medieval manuscripts, rare printed books and a library of standard authors and was intended to be an educational and creative resource for the metalworkers of Sheffield. The St George's Museum at Walkley was very small and, from 1890, the collection was redisplayed at larger premises at Meersbrook Park, Sheffield before closing in 1953. After years in storage, the collection was brought back into public view at the Ruskin Gallery at Norfolk Street in Sheffield city centre in 1985. It is now displayed as the Ruskin Collection at Museum Sheffield's Millennium Galleries.

Today the Guild is a charitable Education Trust, which tries to put Ruskin's ideas into practice in a contemporary way. It has an educational art collection, built up by Ruskin and supplemented since, displayed in the Millennium Galleries, Sheffield. It owns 100 acres of ancient oak woodland and two smallholdings in the Wyre Forest, near Bewdley, Worcestershire which it manages in an environmentally friendly manner. It owns a number of houses in the Arts and Crafts style in the Hertfordshire village of Westmill. It also owns a wild-flower meadow, managed by Natural England, in the village of Sheepscombe, Gloucestershire.