I Dreamt I Dwelt - Celebrating William Butler Yeats
12 August 2025
Announcing a unique autumn concert as Irish Heritage musicians & singers join the WB Yeats Bedford Park Project in the Arts-&-Crafts splendour of St Michael & All Angels, Bedford Park (the Yeats family’s London parish church from 1879 to 1901, at the heart of Yeats’s boyhood London neighbourhood, a unique artists’ colony 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 Yeats family, Nobel-Prize-winning poet & dramatist, 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 innovative “urban village”, a 19c cultural hotspot, with its 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 Irish composers John Field, Thomas Moore, Arthur Sullivan, William Vincent Wallace, Michael William Balfe, Charles Villiers Stanford and Charles 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 an escape from bustling crowded city streets.
I Dreamt I Dwelt - Celebrating William Butler Yeats
Wednesday 22nd October, 7:30 PM - 10:30 PM
St Michael and All Angels, Bedford Park, Bath Road, Chiswick, W4 1TX
