Permission Sought for Artwork Commemorating W B Yeats

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Statue would be outside St. Michael and All Angels Church

A visualisation of how the statue might look from the planning statement

A campaign to build a statue in Bedford Park marking the association of Irish poet W B Yeats with the area is moving closer to achieving its aim.

First launched over 5 years ago it is now at the stage of applying for planning permission to place the statue on a site adjacent to St. Michael & All Angels Church.

It is proposed to erect a contemporary piece of artwork, known as 'Enwrought Light' which has been designed by British artist Conrad Shawcross. The piece is inspired by Yeats’s poem 'He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven' and would comprise a vertical gold and silver fragmented structure designed to reflect light.

Full planning permission is sought from Hounslow Council for the work alongside two informational plaques.

The application states that the association between Yeats and Bedford Park is not widely known, and these plaques will explain Yeats’s distinct relationship with Bedford Park where he spent part of his teens and his twenties, a vital period in his development as a poet and dramatist. He was inspired by the Arts and Craft ambience in the area. A symbolic rather than figurative work was chosen after consulting locally in attempt to show how he was inspired by Bedford Park’s ‘progressive spirit’.

In pre-application discussions, council planning officers said that the design of the sculpture is appropriate for the site and would make a positive contribution to local and national understanding of the Bedford Park suburb.

Yeats spent many years of his early life living in the utopian Arts and Crafts community of Bedford Park. His family moved frequently between London, Dublin and Sligo, moving into Bedford Park’s Woodstock Road in 1879 while 'Willie' attended Godolphin (then a boys’ school) until age 16, then back to Dublin, returning to London when he was 20, and to 3 Blenheim Road in Bedford Park in 1888, where they remained until 1902. W B Yeats wrote one of his most famous poems, The Lake Isle of Innisfree, while living in Bedford Park.

Yeats is the only Nobel Prize winning poet writing in English and brought up in England not to have a statue put up in his honour in this country.

The campaign for the statue was officially launched in 2015 at the Irish Embassy in London. It was spearheaded by local poet, musician, and BBC broadcaster Cahal Dallat. The project set up was enabled by financial support which came from almost entirely local sources. It was originally hoped that the statue would be up in time to mark the 80th anniversary of the death of Yeats but circumstances did not allow this to happen.

A visualisation of how the statue might look from the planning statement

Local organisations including St Michael & All Angels Church, Bedford Park Festival, Chiswick Book Festival and Chiswick Playhouse are represented on the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project committee. Several members of the committee are part of the Bedford Park Society, therefore informal conversations with the Bedford Park Society have taken place as the project developed.

You can read more about the Yeats link with Chiswick in this article by Cahal Dallat written for chiswickw4.com

A statue to another famous Chiswick resident, William Hogarth, was erected some years ago on Chiswick High Road.

The reference for the planning application is P/2021/0577.

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February 24, 2021