Victorian

William Wailes (1808-1881) was born in Newcastle and originally started grocery and tea-dealing business. He studied the manufacture of stained glass in Munich in the 1830s, and by 1838 start his own company in Newcastle-upon-Tyne.
The company began in 1836 as Ward and Nixon, the two worked together for twenty years, exporting windows all over the world. In 1855 they were given the contract for re-glazing of East Window of Lincoln Cathedral. By which time James Nixon started to take less active part in the business and died in 1857.

William Morris (1834–1896) stands as one of the central figures in the revival of British stained glass during the second half of the nineteenth century. Through the firms Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co. and later Morris & Co., his designs — and those of his close collaborators, especially Edward Burne-Jones, Ford Madox Brown, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti — transformed the visual language of Victorian church decoration.








