Campaigners who raised £135,000 to fund an artwork to commemorate Irish poet WB Yeats’ early years in the west London suburb of Bedford Park have launched the next phase of their appeal.

Discover Bedford Park with WB Yeats is aimed at creating a visitor experience, including a smartphone guided walk, creative workbooks for school groups, a lecture for locals, and a video for social media. The new appeal is seeking £24,500 to help make this happen, and has already raised nearly £16,000 towards the target. The artwork by Conrad Shawcross will be unveiled later this year, on 13 June.

Yeats spent two-thirds of his young life among the London “roadways” and “pavements grey” in his famous poem, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, written in Bedford Park. The Yeats-inspired sculpture by Conrad Shawcross in Bedford Park will include these lines, engraved in a wide circular stone base:   

             Enwrought with golden and silver light,

            The blue and the dim and the dark cloths

            Of night and light and the half light

The lines, inspiring Shawcross’s upward helical spiral, are taken from Yeats’s ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’, a poem partly inspired by Yeats’s sister Lily’s Arts and Crafts tapestry work for William Morris.

You can donate to the new stage of the appeal here