Tickets on sale for the 60th Bedford Park Festival

Bedford Park Festival celebrates 60 years

The Bedford Park Festival is celebrating 60 years this year. The two-week arts and community festival which takes place early in June started originally as a campaign to save the beautiful Arts & Crafts houses of Bedford Park, which in the mid-sixties were under threat.

Bedford Park was then a rundown area, with properties sublet into bedsits and falling into disrepair. As Victorian architecture was out of fashion, the local council started knocking down houses and replacing them with blocks of flats.

After the council demolished a large house in Bedford Road and replaced it with a five-storey old people’s home, two public-spirited residents, Harry Taylor and Tom Greeves, set up the Bedford Park Society with the aim of getting local buildings listed for preservation.

In 1967 the newly-appointed vicar of St Michael & All Angels Church, Cannon Jack Jenner, came up with the idea of the festival to raise money for the church and awareness for their campaign, which has been hosted and run ever since by the church.

READ ALSO: Bedford Park Festival history by Torin Douglas

Over the decades a roll call of local celebrities has opened the festival at Green Days – the huge church fete which takes place on the green opposite Turnham Green tube station on the first Saturday and Sunday. Names include actors Hayley Mills, Richard Briers and Elizabeth McGovern, singer-songwriter Sophie Ellis-Bextor, artist Peter Blake and journalist John Humphrys.

Gyles Brandreth and Harriet Jayne

Gyles Brandreth and violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason top the bill at this year’s festival

Top names taking part in the festival this year include celebrated author, broadcaster, raconteur and former MP Gyles Brandreth and BBC Proms performer, violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason.

Gyles Brandreth will share childhood memories and hilarious stories of the best (and worst!) moments of his unlikely life in Up Memory Lane with Harriet Jayne on Monday 22 June, in St Michael & All Angels Church at 7.30pm.

Braimah Kanneh-Mason and Jâms Colman

Concerts

Braimah Kanneh-Mason and acclaimed pianist Jâms Colman will be giving a concert of music for violin and piano by Clara and Robert Schumann, Beethoven and Pärt on Monday 15 June at 7pm, which will be free for under-18s, to broaden young people’s access to live music in Chiswick.

Other young musicians taking part in the festival will be the award-winning Australian baritone Allyn Wu and ambassador for the Benedetti Foundation Poppy McGhee, who is hosting a ‘cushion concert’ for young children and giving workshops in schools.

These concerts are made possible by the Festival’s three-year partnership with Pladis UK, maker of McVities and other biscuit brands, based in Chiswick Park, one of dozens of local companies that sponsor the Festival.

Students from ArtsEd – Lucia Mcglauclin, Tom Jocham, Emily Leeland, Jordan Dixon and Hartley Mackenzie – will sing hits from Les Miserables, Wicked and other shows in An Evening of Musical Theatre on Wednesday 24 June at 7.30pm.

Mark Viner; Milly Forrest; David Juritz

The soprano Milly Forrest, who first sang in the church at the age of eight in the children’s musicals Annie, Oliver and Wizard of Oz, will take part in the 60th Festival Gala Concert on Thursday 25 June alongside two other Festival favourites – violinist David Juritz, who has played in every Festival for over 30 years, and a more recent but equally talented arrival in Bedford Park, the virtuoso pianist Mark Viner.

READ ALSO: David Juritz, Virtuoso violinist

Across the two weeks of the festival as well as concerts there will be talks, walks, film & theatre, art and photography exhibitions and open-air events – something for every age.

The festival runs from Friday 12 -Sunday 28 June 2026, opening with a lunchtime celebrity organ recital by international organist D’Arcy Trinkwon in St Michael & All Angels Church Friday 12 June and closing with the Bedford Park Festival Mass: Schubert No 3 in B flat, led by the Bedford Park Festival Orchestra and Chorus. The preacher will be Fr Kevin Morris, the vicar of St Michael & All Angels. Fr Kevin said:

Fr Kevin Morris

“It’s wonderful to celebrate 60 years of the Bedford Park Festival with such an exciting lineup of performers and events. We look forward to welcoming everyone to Bedford Park during Green Days weekend and the rest of the Festival fortnight.”

Walks and talks

Bedford Park’s most famous former resident WB Yeats will be remembered at his Birthday Poetry Evening with guest poet Imtiaz Dharker and in the WB Yeats Walk led by Cahal Dallat, poet, broadcaster and founder of the WB Yeats Bedford Park Artwork Project.

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.

The Victorian Society, which has its headquarters in Priory Gardens beside St Michael & All Angels Church, will remember the work of the Festival’s first patron, Sir John Betjeman, who was also one of the Society’s founders, at its Open House evening on Tuesday 23 June.

Joanna Smith of Historic England will give a talk about her book England’s Suburbs: 1820-2020.

St Michael & All Angels porch by Michael Stiff

Art & Photography

Art is represented by the annual Bedford Park Summer Exhibition in the church, the Craft Fair on Green Days weekend and the Artists At Home studios event in the middle weekend.

New this year is Chiswick Artists Night in the Tabard pub on Tuesday 9 June, and there will be the usual Exhibitions Preview Party in the church on Friday 12 June.

The Photographic Competition and Exhibition runs alongside the art show in the church throughout the first week of the festival, from June 13 – 19 June, and you will be able to see the photographs on display on The Chiswick Calendar website as well.

Oscar Wilde

Theatre

Other Festival events will include Sleeping Who?, a talk on the spectacular Russian repertoire of the Royal Ballet by Sarah Lenton of BBC Radio 3; The Boomerang Club, one of London’s most best loved spoken word groups; and, at the Tabard Theatre, Gerald Logan in Wilde Without The Boy, Gareth Armstrong’s staging of De Profundis, based on the letter Oscar Wilde wrote to his friend and lover Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas from his prison cell in Reading jail.

Helena Bonham Carter and Eddie Marsan in Sixty Six (2006)

Cinema

Finally, The Chiswick Cinema will mark 60 years since England ‘s 1966 victory in the World Cup with a screening of Sixty Six, ‘a charming comedy-drama’ starring Chiswick’s own Eddie Marsan and Helena Bonham Carter about a boy’s bar mitzvah on the day of the great match. Later that evening, England will play Panama in this year’s FIFA Tournament.

Tickets on sale via TicketSource.

Profits will support St Michael & All Angels Church, which runs the festival as part of its mission of arts and community outreach, and its three 2026 charities: The Upper Room, helping the needy in Shepherd’s Bush; The McCabe Educational Trust, which supports a range of health and education projects in the Holy Land; and The Mulberry Centre, celebrating its 25th anniversary supporting those affected by cancer.

READ ALSO: For 25 years The Mulberry Centre has made a big difference to those affected by cancer