Birmingham's existing visual culture made it highly receptive to Arts and Crafts thinking. The Arts and Crafts Movement itself had been born out of the Birmingham Set: a group of undergraduates, most of whom were from Birmingham, that formed at Oxford University in the 1850s and whose members included William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. The direct relevance of the practice of design and production to the Birmingham economy gave such issues a high-profile within the town, and the aesthetic and social philosophy of the key Arts and Crafts influence John Ruskin was well established among Birmingham's governing Liberal elite by the 1870s. It was on a trip to Birmingham in 1855 that Morris had decided to pursue architecture as a career, and he was to maintain close links with the town over following decades, serving as President of the Birmingham Society of Artists in 1878. By the 1890s Arts and Crafts architects dominated the Birmingham Architectural Association and architectural teaching at the Birmingham School of Art, and the Movement provided the first two Directors of the Birmingham School of Architecture from its foundation in 1905.