The William Hogarth Trust will be placing the usual wreath of autumn flowers at the foot of Hogarth’s statue in Chiswick High Road at noon on 10 November 2012.
Hogarth was born in Smithfield in 1697, 315 years ago. He acquired his second home in Chiswick in 1749 close to several of his friends’ homes. He worked on some of his printing plates in his studio at the bottom of the garden on his last day in Chiswick. Feeling unwell, he went back to his home in Leicester Fields (now Leicester Square) and died overnight, tended by his wife’s cousin, Mary Lewis, on 25/26 October 1764.

Sales Particulars, 1901
(Chiswick Local Studies Library, Hounslow Council)
The Bedford Park Society has invited the Trust’s Chairman, Val Bott, to give their Betjeman Lecture this year. She will take as her theme the attempt to save Hogarth’s House from redevelopment in 1901, an early conservation campaign.
Bedford Park artists, historians and collectors were prominent in the Hogarth’s House Preservation Committee. Few homes of famous people had been preserved at that time and they struggled to raise sufficient support and funds. But it was an interesting predecessor of the Bedford Park Society, founded in 1963 in response to the threat of inappropriate development and demolition in the first garden suburb. Their work led to the creation of a conservation area in 1970.
The talk will take place at St Michael & All Angels, Bedford Park, at 8pm. Tickets cost £7.50 and will be on sale at the door. Proceeds go to the Cure Parkinson’s Trust, in memory of its first patron, Sir John Betjeman, who suffered from this disease.