welcome

from Coffee-House Poetry organiser, Anne-Marie Fyfe

The poetry of music, the music in poetry… Join us in Nobel-Prize-winning poet WB Yeats’s boyhood London neighbourhood for a musical evening celebrating Yeats & fellow-Bedford-Park poets & musicians, & their involvement with the Irish classical composers who brought together traditional airs & contemporary poetry in this unique cultural quarter of London.

We’re celebrating the 150th anniversary of the innovative first-garden-suburb of Bedford Park in the beautiful Arts-&-Crafts ambience of St Michael & All Angels where many of you come to our annual Yeats-Birthday Coffee-House Poetry events, & where our ‘local’ poet is honoured by Conrad Shawcross RA’s dazzling Yeatsian gyre which so many of you supported & have come to visit.

See details (right): booking now, & we’re looking forward to an amazingly sociable cultural happening!

Also booking now, starts Friday 31st October, next in our creative & critical BetweenTheLines series, as Cahal Dallat features six more poets for investigation & inspiration with collective weekly workshopping of your new work (see classes page).

classes & courses

booking now

  • sun 26 oct—sun 21 dec, £280: an enchantment of maps: vision, cartography, inspiration: 7-wk creative-writing workshop series with anne-marie fyfe
  • fri 31 oct—sat 20 dec, £280: between the lines: 7-wk masterclass with cahal dallat

current
  • sun 21 sep—sun 16 nov, £280: an enchantment of maps: vision, cartography, inspiration: 7-wk creative-writing workshop series with anne-marie fyfe
  • fri 19 sep—sat 8 nov, £280: between the lines: 7-wk masterclass with cahal dallat
  • sun 29 jun—sun 24 aug: taking a walk: the poetry of footfall: 7-wk creative-writing workshop series with anne-marie fyfe

recent
  • sun 27 apr—sat 28 jun: root & branch: the enchantment of trees: 7-wk creative-writing workshop series with anne-marie fyfe
  • fri 16 may—sat 5 jul: between the lines: 7-wk masterclass with cahal dallat
  • sun 30 mar—sat 7 jun: the avian eye: 7-wk creative-writing workshop series with anne-marie fyfe
  • sun 2 mar—sat 3 may: beyond the blue: 7-wk creative-writing workshop series with anne-marie fyfe
  • fri 21 feb—sat 12 apr: between the lines: 7-wk masterclass with cahal dallat
  • sun 26 jan—sat 29 mar: nocturne: 7-wk creative-writing workshop series with anne-marie fyfe
  • sun 12 jan—sat 15 mar: home truth: architecture & longing: 7-wk creative-writing workshop series with anne-marie fyfe
  • fri 10 jan—sat 1 mar: between the lines: 7-wk masterclass with cahal dallat

See full details of classes and workshops

next event

wed 22 oct, 7.30pm: i dreamt i dwelt: irish composers and bedford park’s heyday with irish heritage & wb yeats bedford park project celebrating Bedford Park’s 150th anniversary

Venue: St. Michael & All Angels Church, opp. Turnham Grn Tube, Bath Rd Chiswick London W4 1TX
Tickets: £20 (incl. wine), £5 for under 35s, from Irish Heritage

‘Come, we must have music…’
The Player Queen: WB Yeats

A unique autumn concert as Irish Heritage musicians & singers join us in the Arts-&-Crafts splendour of St Michael & All Angels (the Yeats family’s parish church from 1879 to 1901, at the heart of Yeats’s boyhood London neighbourhood, an innovative cultural community founded 150-yrs-ago by Dublin-born Jonathan Carr), in a programme celebrating the great Irish composers who dominated London’s music scene in this garden-suburb’s first quarter-century.

The talented Yeatses, Nobel-Prize-winning poet, Willie, Arts-&-Crafts founders Lily & Lolly, and Jack B, Ireland’s greatest 20c painter, grew up with Sligo parents in a home that resounded with Irish conversation, story and song, at the heart of this “urban village”, surrounded by a unique local community of artists, poets, playwrights, actors, musicians, composers, arrangers, lyricists and music publishers (many of them Irish) who interacted, collaborated with, and, like all of London, flocked to hear, the music & songs of 19c Irish composers including Field, Moore, Sullivan, Wallace, Balfe, Stanford and Wood, their Celtic tonality, inventiveness, beguiling language and traditional airs bringing a touch of the pastoral, the transcendent, the enchanted, to the teeming Dickensian capital, rather as Bedford Park itself famously offered, as the Yeatses found, an escape from bustling crowded city streets.

The latter two composers, Stanford and Wood, not only helped found both English and Irish Folk Song Societies with help from Bedford Park connections, but also taught an astounding generation of gifted British and Irish composers (Herbert Hughes, of Salley Gardens fame, Rebecca Clarke, Stokowski, Martin Shaw, Bridge, Ireland, Coleridge Taylor, Gurney, Goossens, Bliss, Vaughan Williams and Holst to name a few), encouraging them to find inspiration in both traditional legends and contemporary poetry – including works by Yeats and other Bedford Park poets – and to explore traditional English, as well as Irish, airs, thus creating a 20th-century English musical revival as rich as the Celtic Revival that Yeats and Bedford Park friends created for Ireland!

Bedford Park Society Exhibition 1875-2025

Thanks to Irish Heritage (who, for over 50 years, have encouraged the appreciation of Irish music in London and funded the development of so many young Irish composers, musicians and singers) the evening’s programme features Aimee Kearney (soprano), Stephen Walker (tenor), Georgina Cassidy (piano) and Brian Hughes (piano), and has been developed by Brian, Irish Heritage’s Artistic Director, in collaboration with host and WB Yeats Bedford Park founder/organiser, Irish poet, musician and broadcaster, Cahal Dallat, who will give an introductory talk on the composers and their Bedford Park connections. And the Bedford Park Society’s 1875-2025 exhibition, The Community at Bedford Park: Ahead of the World in Everything? will be on display in the church that evening (see pics below), so do come early, enjoy a glass of wine and view the story of this rare architectural gem and its artistic impact!

events

  • wed 22 oct, 7.30pm: i dreamt i dwelt: irish composers and bedford park’s heyday with irish heritage & wb yeats bedford park project celebrating Bedford Park’s 150th anniversary
  • thu 12 jun, 7.30 for 8pm, £10: night & light & the half-light bedford park festival — yeats-birthday poetry night with special guest christopher reid
  • sun 15 jun, 2.30-5pm, £24: land of heart’s desire: wb yeats literary walk with cahal dallat

See full details of poetry readings

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