Home Sweet Home in Bedford Park
ArtsEd Schools, London, W4 1LY
Thursday 24th September 2026 8:00PM
We furnish our homes to express our taste, values and style. Can peeping behind the red brick gables and white painted joinery of Bedford Park’s façades enable us to discover more about the estate’s Victorian and Edwardian residents?
While photographs of house interiors of this period are rare, a few surviving contemporary descriptions, prints and photographs, some of them only recently discovered, record real Bedford Park interiors.
Val Bott MBE, curator and historian, will use these resources to discuss what might have influenced the choice of furnishings that would make these new houses into homes. What elements of the interiors were installed by the builders? Did newcomers bring family pieces from their previous homes or buy new Aesthetic Movement or Arts & Crafts pieces appropriate to the new style of “Queen Anne” architecture? Were they influenced by the early Bedford Park community’s tendency to look back fondly to the past or by the presence of numerous skilled crafts people working nearby? And from whom would residents have purchased furniture, accessories and textiles?
While photographs of house interiors of this period are rare, a few surviving contemporary descriptions, prints and photographs, some of them only recently discovered, record real Bedford Park interiors.
Val Bott MBE, curator and historian, will use these resources to discuss what might have influenced the choice of furnishings that would make these new houses into homes. What elements of the interiors were installed by the builders? Did newcomers bring family pieces from their previous homes or buy new Aesthetic Movement or Arts & Crafts pieces appropriate to the new style of “Queen Anne” architecture? Were they influenced by the early Bedford Park community’s tendency to look back fondly to the past or by the presence of numerous skilled crafts people working nearby? And from whom would residents have purchased furniture, accessories and textiles?
Event Details
Starts at 8:00PM
