Generations of Londoners have been intimate with Enid Marx’s work, though few, even now, would recognise her name. The artist and textile designer created several popular moquettes for the Tube in the 1930s, her dense, geometric patterns hosting daily shoals of commuters, tourists, schoolchildren, idlers and tipsy partygoers up until the late 1960s. And if you weren’t sitting on her work, you might be licking it: she was also responsible for a series of 1953 stamps designed to celebrate the accession of Elizabeth II.
The same city that carried her works back and forth underground was also home, in a large mid-19th-century house in Barnsbury, to a more personal project. Marx and her partner, Margaret Lambert, a historian of European politics, spent decades filling 39 Thornhill Road with an idiosyncratic collection of folk and vernacular art that was, by turns, strange, sincere and enjoyably silly. It was a genre of creativity and craft that, as described in their 1945 book English Popular and Traditional Art, was ‘hard to define though easy enough to recognise when seen’ – the work of ordinary people, melding decoration and function, valued for its ‘forthrightness, gaiety, delight in bright colours and sense of well-balanced design’. Think Staffordshire dogs, glazed mermaids, papier-mâché figurines and a coronation mug designed by fellow Royal College of Art alumnus Eric Ravilious.
This summer, Compton Verney stages The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design, an exhibition showcasing her prodigious and peculiarly influential output. Drawing on items from the Warwickshire gallery’s permanent collection alongside a series of significant loans, it teases out the connections between the objects she and Lambert accumulated and the work Marx was busy making.
To prepare for the exhibition, Compton Verney senior curator Oli McCall and academic Az Crawford, whose decade-long research has shaped the show, visited Marx and Lambert’s house just before it was sold. It hadn’t changed much since this magazine first described the space in November 2004, noting ‘corn dollies, clocks, carved wooden gingerbread moulds, a ship figurehead, painted rolling-pins, Dutch tiles, tinsel pictures, barge teapots and a wealth of crockery jostling for space’. In the kitchen, the hand-painted blue-and-white tiles, completed in the 1960s by students of Marx from Croydon College of Art, were still very much in place, as were the textiles that she not only designed but lived alongside. This included, as Crawford recalls, a chaise longue that still had ‘Marx’s hairs on it’ when it subsequently made its way to the gallery.
Part of the pleasure for Marx and Lambert was not just in the sifting, seeking and finding, but in their joint intellectual endeavour. Lambert, as a historian, saw these objects as social documents – evidence of disappearing skills, or communities and their singular, ingrained traditions – that also spoke to wider ideas of nationhood, especially on the precipice of World War II. Marx, as a designer and teacher, was interested in precedents: folk forms she could draw on herself and pass on to students. Together, Crawford notes, they were ‘very intrepid’ researchers, driving around the country, contacting local cathedrals and truffling out desired pieces. A small cornucopia, a carved folk object Marx initially sent to Lambert as a love token and later used as the basis for a textile design, captures the intimacy at the heart of their enterprise.
They loved, as Crawford puts it, ‘things that they personally found very amusing, and that spoke… [to one] another’. The display also reflects the development of what McCall describes as ‘a distinctively British Modernism’ – a school that absorbed waning Arts and Crafts ideals, negotiated the increasingly fraught relationship between the handmade and the machine and was saturated, as was all British cultural life, in an imperial worldview that, from a powerful, subterranean level, influenced the very idea of folk art. Its proponents, Marx included, drew regularly on collections assembled through colonial acquisition, as well as spectacles such as the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley – objects and craft traditions stripped of context and reframed as ‘primitive’ curiosities, the implicit counterpoint to European fine art.
Marx and Lambert were part of a broader network of female artists and makers – many of them, like the former’s mentors Phyllis Barron and Dorothy Larcher (WoI May 1994), living and working in lesbian partnerships. Potters, weavers, designers, gallerists, publishers: the applied arts offered a surprising degree of financial and social autonomy at the time, allowing these women to tread a path towards creative freedom just below the threshold of public scrutiny. The collection reflects this sensibility. In places, the taste veers towards what McCall calls ‘kitschy-campy’: vividly glazed figures of Saint George, carved gingerbread moulds in the shape of cats and saints. In others, it reflects the couple’s liking for imperfect objects that spoke, in their cracks and oddities, of failure as an inevitable (and valuable) part of the human condition.
The exhibition aims to hold the jaunty surfaces alongside more complicated depths. A pattern is never merely a pattern, but a dense accretion of histories, inspirations, techniques, technologies and contemporary social currents. ‘There are multiple layers which congeal,’ Crawford observes: the folk objects, the intimacies of a collection that was partly an archive and partly a set of love tokens exchanged over 40 years, the borrowings of two women who, despite their socialist convictions, breathed in the air of empire, indiscriminately combining the dyeing traditions of South Asia, the geometric languages of West African textiles and artefacts from the British Museum with their own, home-grown obsessions.
Such layers inform the show’s curatorial approach, which moves dexterously through these different strata, seeking to understand the materials that make up a life: whether an anonymously made teacup or a plum-shaded grid pattern on the seats of the Metropolitan line, providing a backdrop to millions of journeys.
‘The Pattern of Life: Enid Marx and Modern British Design’ runs at Compton Verney, Wark CV35 9HZ (01926 645500; comptonverney.org.uk), 18 July–3 Jan
A version of this article appears in the August 2026 issue of ‘The World of Interiors’. Learn about our subscription offers
Sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, and be the first to receive exclusive stories like this one, direct to your inbox
