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The Housmans and Street
Laurence Housman and his sister Clemence were born in Bromsgrove, studied and worked in London, and moved to Street in Somerset after the First World War. They spent the rest of their long lives in the house that, with the help of Roger and Sarah Clark, they designed and built, Longmeadow in Street.
Laurence had already published many books, and Clemence had published three novels, before coming to Street. In Street Clemence concentrated on home-making, and Laurence wrote many more books and plays. He achieved financial success with the play Victoria Regina.
Laurence had trained as an artist. The many book illustrations he produced between 1892 and 1902, mostly engraved in wood by Clemence, are a lasting testimony to the skill of both brother and sister.
Both Clemence and Laurence were very active in the women's rights movement, Clemence organising civil disobedience and Laurence becoming a public speaker.
Laurence in his autobiography wrote of his love for Somerset, and for Street in particular:
There is a familiar hymn, beginning with the words, 'O sweet and blessed country'... it is not only 'O sweet and blessed country' which expresses my thankfulness, but 'O sweet and blessed county' - the county of Somerset. Over forty years ago I found myself looking into the very heart of Somerset almost without knowing it; for I had not realized what an embracing view of Somerset looked like, till from the top of Mendip above the Cheddar Gorge I gazed westward on such a delectable stretch of country as, till then, I had never seen.
At that time I had no notion that I should ever come to live in Somerset - to live actually within the range of what then lay before me. But as I caught sight of Glastonbury Tor for the first time, with a flow of wooded hills to right and to left, and here and there crowning columns - memorials to what men or what events, I did not know - a sudden thrill took hold of me; I felt as one standing on Pisgah, gazing into a Promised Land which might never be mine: and as my arms had embraced the white oxen of Assisi, so did my heart embrace the hills of Somerset. A few days later, passing over Glastonbury Moor after an evening storm of rain, I saw the Tor encircled by a double rainbow against a dark leaden sky; and again the Pisgah sense came to me that this was the land where I would love to be. Half an hour later I passed within a stone's-throw of the spot where 'Longmeadow', my home, has now been built for me.
A while back I heard, with great contentment, somebody say that Somerset was the most beautiful county in England; and when somebody else (controverting that statement) named some other wretched county as more beautiful, I in my infatuation said that, if so, I did not wish to see it.
... for me, as a place of domicile, Somerset with its accompaniments is as near Heaven as I am ever likely to get. 'Longmeadow' was designed for me (an improvement on the pattern I sent him) by the Quaker friend from whom I bought the land. The garden we designed ourselves...
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