Well, we made it... or rather, you made it happen, three-hundred-and-seventy-nine of you, no less, pledging £134K of your gold and silver to see the enwrought "golden and silver light" of Yeats's Irish literary genius swirling, flying, gyring upwards from the very London "roadway" and "the pavements grey" he walked as a boy, dreaming of Irish landscape, lore and legend: or at least from the green and very-Bedford-Park leafily wooded triangle between main road and the footpath to the Yeats family's two Bedford Park, London, addresses from 1879 to 1902... Soon the only Nobel Prize-winning poet to grow up in England WILL have, in London's uniquely Bohemian/Utopian Arts-&-Crafts suburb, a stunning Conrad Shawcross tribute ("of hammered gold and gold enamelling" in Yeats's phrase) on the route he walked home to write his best-loved poem of exile, "The Lake Isle of Innisfree". All of you who backed us will be listed on www.wbyeatsbedfordpark.com, including, of course, London's Royal Academy of Arts, Dukes Education, Irish Embassy London, Hounslow Council, The Tabard (Yeats's local!), Josephine Hart Poetry Foundation, Jimmy Page and Scarlett Sabet, Rowan Williams, Bob Geldof, Marie Heaney, The Jeremy Vine, Anne-Marie Fyfe, Polly Devlin, Tom Paulin, Roy Foster, Edna and Michael Longley, Fergal Keane, Kevin McNally, Phyllis Logan, Shevaun Wilde, Ciarán Hinds, Martin and Joyce Enright, Marina Warner, Joseph Hassett, countless poets, actors, academics, Yeats fanatics, and lovers of all the arts, and literally hundreds of local Bedford Park residents. And thanks, of course, for wonderful coverage over the past five months, to Bedford Park Society, The Poetry Society's "Poetry News", Irish Times Culture, Times Literary Supplement, The Tablet, Chiswick Mag, The Irish Post, The Chiswick Calendar, W4 Newsletter, The Chiswick Herald, Chiswick Pier Trust, The Irish World, Literary London, #CoffeeHousePoetry, Write Out Loud, EUNIC, Irish Literary Society, and numberless poetry, arts, cultural and local/community and parish newsletters, websites and blogs! Real work begins today, starting with a Conrad Shawcross Studios planning meeting and continuing with both the practical and the arts/educational/heritage aspects you can read about under "What happens now?" in last-week's Chiswick Calendar (https://chiswickcalendar.co.uk/its-coming-home-the-yeats-bedford-project-is-almost-there/) and we'll keep you informed of progress over the next year to the grand unveiling celebration on WB Yeats's birthday on 13th June 2022. Meantime, thanks, all of you, for such incredibly generous support!
