After three years in depth research, Dr Esmé Whittaker completed her PhD, The Arts and Crafts House in the Lake District: Buildings, Landscapes and Communities, at the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2010. She has lectured widely on this subject including a paper for the Society of Architectural Historians of Great Britain symposium in 2008 which was published as the chapter 'Self-Conscious Regionalism: Dan Gibson and the Arts and Crafts House in the Lake District' in Built from Below: British architecture and the vernacular edited by Peter Guillery (Routledge, 2010). More recently she has given lectures at the Edwin Lutyens study day at Great Dixter (2010) and at Blackwell: the Arts and Crafts House (2011). As a native Cumbrian, she is passionate about the architecture of her home region and keen that this unique branch of the Arts and Crafts movement gets the attention it deserves.
Dr Whittaker is an Assistant Curator in the Word & Image Department at the Victoria and Albert Museum. She was the Assistant Curator for their Spring 2011 exhibition The Cult of Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement 1860-1900. She contributed the focus piece ‘Leighton and Aitchison’ to the accompanying book (V&A Publishing, 2011) and wrote V&A Pattern: Walter Crane (V&A Publishing, 2011). She has recently curated the exhibition William Morris: Story, Memory, Myth at Two Temple Place, London, and wrote the accompanying catalogue.
