Discover Yeats’s Bedford Park

Welcome to Bedford Park, and we’d like to show you around some of the places that played a part in the life and literary work of poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats.

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)

Born in Sandymount, Co. Dublin, Irish poet and dramatist William Butler Yeats was brought to London, aged two, by his family. He spent twenty of his first thirty years in London, mostly at two addresses in Bedford Park.

Here he wrote some of the world’s greatest and best-loved poems and his first staged play. He also played a leading role in the cultural revival that shaped modern Ireland and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1923.

Conrad Shawcross’s Yeatsian Enwrought Light envisages the poet’s genius spiralling upwards from the “romantic excitement” of Bedford Park. At the same time it celebrates the progressive, communitarian, multicultural and spiritually-questing ethos of this unique London neighbourhood.

The Yeats Family

Yeats’s father, lawyer-turned-painter, John Butler Yeats chose to raise his children in the late-19th century Utopian Arts-&-Crafts experiment that was Bedford Park. William’s younger brother, Jack, studied art locally and became Ireland’s greatest 20th century painter. His sisters “Lily” (Susan Mary) and “Lolly” (Elizabeth) were central to Ireland’s Arts and Crafts movement.

From his mother, Susan, and her Sligo family, Yeats inherited a deep love of Irish landscape, legend and lore, which, nurtured by Bedford Park’s aesthetic & intellectual atmosphere, led to a London-Irish migrant child becoming one of English literature’s most significant figures.

Starting to Explore

You can browse Yeats’s Bedford Park poetry-places by clicking on “Poetry Places” above

OR

You can choose “Guided Walks” which start from location #1, “Enwrought Light”, Conrad Shawcross’s dazzling artwork in the green space to the left of St. Michael and All Angels Church, Bath Road, which can be seen on turning right from Turnham Green Tube Station.

Follow the walk through to location #8 and you’re back at St Michael and All Angels, having explored Yeats’s Bedford Park:

From location #1 to location #8: