ABSTRACT
In the early 1880s, the London suburb of Bedford Park became associated rather vaguely with that vague movement, Aesthet-icism. The beginnings of Bedford Park coincide in date with the rise of the Aesthetic Movement and journalists failed to distinguish between a liking for Morris papers and a philosophy of conduct. The Aesthetes looked back to the eighteenth century, the Jacobean period or the Middle Ages, periods represented in Bedford Park. A contributor to the Gazette, admitting some Aestheticism in the early years of Bedford Park, found that by 1883 it had become a place fit for Major-Generals. The impression gathered from the Architectural papers and from the Gazette is of a ye-olde-England, Ruskin and Morris medievalism. Both externally and internally, Bedford Park houses leave an impression of time-travelling in taste and this is typical of aestheticism; the sense in Pater's words that all periods, types, schools of taste are in themselves equal, a remark reflecting acute historical self-consciousness.
