2025 Summer of festivals – The Bedford Park Festival

Green Days to be opened by Al Murray

It is festival season, starting in Chiswick this weekend with Green Days, the traditional weekend-long fete which marks the start of the Bedford Park Festival.

Image: Al Murray 

Comedian, Second World War historian and long term Chiswick resident Al Murray will be opening Green Days this year, fresh from his highly successful Pub Landlord tour. He will declare the Bedford Park Festival open on Saturday 7 June at 11am on Acton Green, opposite Turnham Green tube station.

Green Days, if you don’t know, is a church fete with bells and whistles on – a bandstand, a beer tent, a craft village, cakes, barbeque, football, funfair …

Meet The Chiswick Calendar team and see the Photography and Art exhibitions

The Chiswick Calendar will be there both days as usual with a stall just behind the bandstand, with a raffle promoting our Club Card businesses – and they have offered some fabulous prizes. You can see the full list of prizes on offer at the below link.

READ ALSO: The Chiswick Calendar’s Green Days raffle prizes 2025

We are also sponsoring the Photography competition and exhibition, as we do each year, along with Snappy Snaps Chiswick and Chiswick Auctions. The exhibition will be judged by Fine Art photographer Julia Fullerton-Batten.

Image: Julia Fullerton-Batten

READ ALSO: Julia Fullerton-Batten, Fine Art photographer – Profile

We will be showing this year’s entries on The Chiswick Calendar website from Friday evening, and you can see the physical photographs and vote for a winner in St Michael & All Angels Church on Bath Road from Friday evening, 6 June at 6.45pm.

The Church will be open from 12 noon – 6pm daily to view the photography exhibition and also the Summer Exhibition of paintings, until Friday 13 June.

Photograph of the day by Jon Perry – enlightenshade

Green Days on one of those years when the sun refused to shine; photograph Jon Perry 

Bedford Park Festival – a fortnight of concerts, talks, walks, film & theatre

This year the Bedford Park Festival is marking the 150th anniversary of Bedford Park, the first ‘garden suburb’.

READ ALSO: Bedford Park 150 anniversary project turns up new information about its history

The Bedford Park Society has created a special exhibition for the occasion, with new research into the history of the Victorian suburb, which will be on display at Chiswick Auctions in the Barley Mow centre from Tuesday 10 – Friday 20 June.

Marti Webb (L); Jonathan Scott (C); Braimah Kanneh-Mason (R) – photograph by John Davis

Stars of the West End and classical music

Tickets are selling fast for the programme of events, which includes concerts from Marti Webb, the singer who starred in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s hit musical Evita, organist Jonathan Scott & violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason. The Festival runs from Friday 6 to Sunday 22 June 2025.

Jonathan Scott, described by BBC Radio 3 as “the leading British organist”, will perform a recital on the organ in St Michael & All Angels Church at 12.30 on the opening Friday, 6 June, which will include Jonathan’s own arrangements of great orchestral works from Bach, Vivaldi and Mozart.

Tickets: Jonathan Scott organ recital

Marti Webb will perform songs from Evita, Tell Me on a Sunday and other West End shows at 7pm on Saturday 14 June.

Tickets: Marti Webb songs from the musicals

BBC Proms performers Braimah Kanneh-Mason and Plinio Fernandez are two of the top young musicians giving concerts. Others include Classic FM 2024 Rising Star and BBC Young Musician finalist, Rob Burton, and ambassador for the Benedetti Foundation Poppy McGhee, who is also giving workshops in schools.

Braimah Kanneh-Mason and Plinio Fernandez tickets: Duo perform Piazzolla, Paganini and Villa-Lobos

Rob Burton and Mark Rogers tickets: ‘Expect anything from Debussy to Bach to Turnage’

Poppy McGhee tickets: Three concerts, including one for children up to the age of eight

These concerts are made possible through the Festival’s partnership with Pladis UK, maker of McVities and other biscuit brands, based in Chiswick Park.

Bedford Park Festival favourites

Sarah Lenton, of BBC Radio 3 and Royal Opera House fame, will tell you ‘all you need to know about opera’ in 60 minutes, while popular Bedford Park Festival regulars, virtuoso violinist David Juritz will be back with pianist Mark Viner and friends, playing Mozart, Saints-Saens and Schumann.

Sarah Lenton tickets: All you need to know about opera in 60 minutes

David Juritz, Mark Viner and friends tickets: David Juritz violin; Yuri Zhislin viola; Adrian Bradbury cello; Mark Viner piano

Christopher Reid; Cahal Dallat and Anne-Marie Fyfe; WB Yeats

Events celebrating the 150th anniversary of Bedford Park

Events marking the 150th anniversary of Bedford Park will highlight former and current residents of the first garden suburb, including Nobel prize winning Irish poet WB Yeats, who will be remembered at the annual Poetry Evening and in the WB Yeats Walk – Land of Heart’s Desire – led by Cahal Dallat, poet, broadcaster and founder of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project.

WB Yeats Poetry Evening tickets: Yeats Birthday Poetry Evening: Night & light & the half-light: with special guest Christopher Reid

WB Yeats walk tickets: Land of Heart’s Desire: WB Yeats Literary Walk

The Festival’s longest-running event, the annual Bedford Park Walk, will explore the area’s architectural and literary heritage led by Dr Pamela Bickley and John Scott.

Sir John Betjeman, who helped save Bedford Park from demolition in the 1960s, was one of the founders of The Victorian Society, which has its headquarters in Priory Gardens W4.

He will be remembered at the Society’s own anniversary event, as will Tom Greeves, co-founder of the Bedford Park Society and his wife, the ceramicist Eleanor Greeves, whose Bedford Park tiles and mugs have become collectors’ items.

The historian Deborah Cadbury (Chocolate Wars, Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking, Princes at War) will speak about writing her famous family’s history with Andrew Pears, who is writing the history of Pears Soap, sharing memorable stories and images of two of Britain’s best loved brands which were reaching their heyday as Bedford Park was being planned in 1875.

They will be talking to Torin Douglas, director of the Chiswick Book Festival, in ‘When Cadbury met Pears in Bedford Park’.

bedfordparkfestival,org/events

Visitors at the studio of one of the artists who took part in Artists at Home 2424; Photograph Anna Kunst

Other Festival highlights

Other festival highlights will include Artists At Home open studios over the weekend of 13 – 15 June and the annual open gardens on Sunday 22 June from 2 – 6pm.

READ ALSO: Artists at Home 2025 – June 13-15

READ ALSO: Artists at Home 2025 – June 13-15 Artists to visit

Theatre at the Tabard presents Noel Coward’s Red Peppers, in a double bill with the world premiere of Aged in Wood by Cian Griffin until Saturday 21 June.

Tickets: Red Peppers / Aged in Wood

READ ALSO: Red Peppers and Aged in Wood – Theatre at the Tabard reviews

The Chiswick Cinema will host the Merchant Ivory film Maurice from the novel by EM Forster, who is celebrated with a blue plaque on Arlington Park Mansions beside  Turnham Green, where he lived from 1939 until his death in 1970.

The film, Hugh Grant’s breakthrough role, will be introduced with an interview with the director James Ivory, in conversation with The Chiswick Calendar’s editor Bridget Osborne, recorded at the last Chiswick In Film Festival.

Tickets: Maurice + Pre-recorded introductory interview with James Ivory

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