Keswick School of Industrial Art (KSIA) was founded in 1884 by Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley and his wife Edith as an evening class in woodwork and repoussé metalwork at the Crosthwaite Parish Rooms, in Keswick, Cumbria. The enterprise, designed to alleviate unemployment, prospered, and within ten years more than a hundred men were attending classes. A new building was erected for the school at a nearby site.

Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley was an Anglican priest, poet, local politician and conservationist. He became nationally and internationally known as one of the three founders of the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty in the 1890s.