Golden Jubilee event has host of activities from plays, to talks, concerts and films

Tickets are now on sale for the Bedford Park Festival

Chiswick’s biggest community event, which celebrates its Golden Jubilee this year. There are events for all ages and interests, including concerts, plays, talks, films, walks, exhibitions and gardens.

- Jazz singer Kate Dimbleby performs songs from her new album Songbirds, featured this month on BBC Radio 2 and 6 Music. The concert will take place in St Michael & All Angels Church, which has hosted the Festival since it started 50 years ago.

- Award-winning author and historian William Dalrymple will talk about his life and books in conversation with former BBC and Classic FM presenter Susannah Simons.

- Mavis Cheek, who has cast a local’s eye on Chiswick in her novels, will read a selection of her favourite poems, introduced by Anne-Marie Fyfe, the former president of the Poetry Society.

- Alan Ayckbourn’s hilarious comedy Relatively Speaking will be performed over four nights (and a matinee) at the Tabard Theatre by The XV Theatre Company

- Mozart’s comic opera Cosi fan tutte will be performed by the Young London Sinfonia and singers from the London Conservatoires, led by soprano Milly Forrest – who first performed in the Festival as a child playing Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz.

- The brilliant young clarinet virtuoso Anna Hashimoto will join celebrated violinist David Juritz and friends for Mozart’s Clarinet Quintet and Dvorjak’s American Quartet, in the Festival’s 25th Summer Serenade Concert & Supper.

- For children, there is a varied programme of music, from Stories Through Music with Pelican Music and Seasons of the Year with the Nonesuch Orchestra, to a sing-along showing of the Disney family film The Lion King; and an art exhibition by pupils at Chiswick & Bedford Park Preparatory School.

A range of other concerts and events includes: international concert organist Brink Bush performing Bach’s Goldberg Variations; Sandy Burnett bringing a 21st century take on three great 18th century Bach motets; the Floriade Ensemble; the St Michael & All Angels Choristers; Old Time Music Hall with Hazel Collinson of Shenanigans; stories of an actor’s life in The Tome of the Unknown Actor by Christine Ozanne; and the Oscar-nominated film Lion.

Events marking the Golden Jubilee include The Exhibition That Saved Bedford Park, showing how the first Festival in 1967 led to the listing of 356 houses in the area, saving them from the threat of demolition. There will also be a Golden Jubilee Garden Party, with toasts to those who created Bedford Park, as the world’s first garden suburb, and those who helped save it in the 1960s, including the founders of the Bedford Park Society. The actor John Rowe, who lives locally, will read an extract from the biography of John Betjeman, which describes how it happened.

Several perennial Festival favourites are also celebrating anniversaries – 50 years of the Bedford Park Walk, 30 years of the Bedford Park Summer Exhibition, which showcases more than 100 works by local artists; and 35 years of the Bedford Park Open Gardens. Other popular events include the Artists at Home weekend, in which over 50 local artists and craftworkers display their works; the Photographic Exhibition and Competition; and the Festival Mass on the final Sunday morning.

Tickets are now on sale, and the full programme available.

'Chiswick's favourite fortnight' begins on Friday June 9th with the Preview Party for the Bedford Park Summer Exhibition, the Photographic Exhibition and The Exhibition that saved Bedford Park.

It continues with the Green Days Fete & Craft Fair on June 10th and 11th which attracts thousands of people with its children’s corner, 5-a-side football, music performances, funfair, refreshments,beer tent, Win-A-Meal, High Roller Tombola, books, bric-a-brac, cakes and other stalls.

The Bedford Park Festival is run by St Michael & All Angels Church, with the active support of dozens of local people and businesses. The first Festival took place in 1967 to foster a sense of community, celebrate the arts, and raise money for repairs to the Church. Since then it has raised hundreds of thousands of pounds for charities.

This year the Festival will raise money for: Msaada which helps restore dignity to the forgotten victims of the Rwandan genocide; The Upper Room who feed and support the community in need in West London; The Amber Trust, which enables blind children to fulfil their musical potential; and repairs to St Michael & All Angels Church.

May 22, 2017