The London Blue Plaque Guide

INTRODUCTION

The idea of placing commemorative plaques on the houses of the great and the good was first mooted in 1863 by William Ewart. Ewart was a Liberal MP whose most significant achievement was the passing of the Public Libraries Act of 1850, which he had introduced as a private member's bill the previous year. In putting forward the idea of commemorative plaques he wrote that 'the places which had been the residences of the ornaments of their history could not but be precious to all thinking Englishmen'. (Ewart himself now has his own Blue Plaque in Eaton Place, erected 100 years after he first proposed the idea.) Sir Henry Cole, the first director of what we now know as the Victoria and Albert Museum, was one of those who most vigorously championed Ewart's proposal. Ewart's original intention had been that the government would fund a plaque scheme, but the administration of the day declined to do so. The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) stepped into the breach and in 1864 formed a committee to oversee the choosing and erection of the first plaques. The committee was enthusiastic about the idea that the plaques might give pleasure to 'travellers up and down in omnibuses etc', and that they 'might sometimes prove an agreeable and instructive mode of beguiling a somewhat dull and not very rapid progress through the streets' but, as committees do, it took time to turn its words into actions. It was not until 1867 that the first plaque was erected under the auspices of the RSA. This was placed on 24 Holles Street, once the home of Lord Byron and now, sadly, demolished.

The erection of plaques under the RSA was a slow and stately process. By 1901, when the scheme was taken over by the London County Council (LCC), thirty-six plaques had been put up in thirty-four years. Many of these have now disappeared, the victims of development, demolition and wartime bombs. The oldest plaques still in place are those to Napoleon III in King Street and to the poet John Dryden in Gerrard Street - both date from 1875. Under the LCC the speed with which plaques were erected quickened significantly; they were in charge of the scheme for sixty-four years and put up more than 250 plaques in that period. When, in 1965, the LCC metamorphosed into the Greater London Council (GLC), the new organisation took responsibility for the plaques. Under the GLC the geographical and cultural range of the plaques both expanded. Plaques were erected in outlying London boroughs that had not been under the jurisdiction of the LCC, and there was a more populist choice of individuals deemed worthy of commemoration. (Somebody at the GLC seemed to have a particular fondness for old music-hall stars. At least half a dozen were given their own plaques in the GLC years.) In 1985, with the abolition of the GLC, a new home had to be found for the Blue Plaque scheme (as it was now popularly known) and the Local Government Act of that year gave responsibility to English Heritage.

For thirty years English Heritage have continued to run the scheme and they have put up a further 360 plaques. Currently the decisions about which people should and should not be commemorated are made by the Blue Plaques Panel, which meets three times a year under the chairmanship of Professor Ronald Hutton. Other members of the panel include Sir Peter Bazalgette, Greg Dyke, Professor Jane Glover and the former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. In 2012, there were a number of newspaper reports, most of them inaccurate, suggesting that the scheme was being suspended because of funding cuts. In fact, as English Heritage hurried to make clear in a statement, the scheme was only temporarily closed to new applications while a backlog was reduced. In June 2014, thanks in particular to a generous donation by one individual, the scheme reopened to nominations.

What criteria are used to select the recipients of a Blue Plaque? Any scheme which, in the same year (2014), can commemorate the crime novelist Raymond Chandler, the nineteenth-century Irish political leader Daniel O'Connell and the comedian Tony Hancock, obviously has pleasingly wide-ranging terms of reference. When the official scheme began under the RSA, there were few hard and fast guidelines but, under the LCC and the GLC, rules developed and English Heritage now publish a set of principles for the choosing of those honoured by Blue Plaques. These people must be 'regarded as eminent and distinguished by a majority of members of their own profession or calling'. They must have 'made some important positive contribution to human welfare or happiness'. They must be 'of significant public standing in a London-wide, national or international context' and 'their achievements should have made an exceptional impact in terms of public recognition'. Perhaps the last condition is sometimes honoured in the breach rather than the observance. How much public recognition is there of the name of Sir Fabian Ware, the founder of the Imperial War Graves Commission? Or Dame Ida Mann, a leading twentieth-century ophthalmologist? Or the Victorian sculptor Carlo Marochetti? Yet all three have been honoured in the last few years and who would begrudge them their plaques? Part of the delight in coming across London plaques is the stimulus it often gives to discovering more about the City's past inhabitants. The principle of selection on which English Heritage has been most insistent is the one of time. Without exception, people will not be considered until they have been dead for twenty years. Inside these guidelines, and a few others, English Heritage works hard to come up with new people to commemorate; at present, between ten and fifteen new plaques are unveiled each year. English Heritage has also shown itself eager to democratise the process of choice. If you know of a building and individual that you believe worthy of a plaque, you are free to contact English Heritage with the suggestion. A nomination form can be downloaded from their website.

The success of the official London Blue Plaque scheme means that it has been widely copied both in the capital and in other parts of the country. Between 1998 and 2005, English Heritage itself sponsored an expansion of the Blue Plaque scheme into other English cities. Liverpool had English Heritage plaques installed to more than a dozen of its famous residents, including the poet Wilfred Owen, The Beatles' John Lennon (also recently honoured with a London plaque) and the toy manufacturer Frank Hornby. At the end of 2002 the first English Heritage plaques in Birmingham were erected on houses where the brothers Cadbury, chocolate manufacturers and philanthropists, once lived and they were followed by five more. Plaques were also installed in Southampton (R.J. Mitchell, designer of the Spitfire aircraft, Emily Davies, the campaigner for women's education and four others) and Portsmouth (the comic actor Peter Sellers, the historian Frances Yates and five others). However, these schemes were only ever intended as pilots and, for a number of reasons, running them in cities outside London proved unworkable. They were stopped in 2007.

In London there are many 'unofficial' plaques too - in other words those not put up under the auspices of the RSA, the LCC, the GLC or English Heritage. Many Greater London boroughs have their own schemes. Islington, for example, has been home to some remarkable people and the borough council has erected plaques to some of them, including the eighteenth-century feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, the comic actor Kenneth Williams (also awarded an English Heritage plaque in 2014) and the artist Cyril Mann. The Borough of Bromley has plaques to (among others) the children's author Enid Blyton, the songwriter Ewan MacColl and Thomas Crapper, the aptly named sanitary engineer. Similarly, Lewisham has plaques to some of its famous former residents, amongst them Sir George Grove, founding editor of the famous dictionary of music that bears his name, Ernest Dowson, the decadent poet of the 1890s who was born in the borough, and the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who was pastor of a church in Forest Hill for two years in the 1930s before returning to Germany where he died, in 1945, at the hands of the Nazis.

Many non-governmental societies and groups have also sponsored the erection of plaques within London. The Heath and Hampstead Society, for example, has been in existence since 1897 and has been behind the erection of a number of plaques to well-known Hampstead residents, including the cellist Jacqueline du Pré and the photographer Cecil Beaton. The Marchmont Association, for residents of Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury and its environs, established a plaque scheme in 2009 and well over a dozen now exist. In 2014 plaques to William Reeve (56 Marchmont Street), an eighteenth-century composer, the writer Jerome K. Jerome (32 Tavistock Place) and Roger Fry, the artist and critic, were unveiled and more plaques are in the pipeline for 2015. And since 1995 Comic Heritage (part of The Heritage Foundation) has been unveiling its own Blue Plaques to late, lamented comic talents, including Eric Morecambe, Hattie Jacques, Sid James and Harry H. Corbett.

Some groups and organisations have sponsored one-off plaques. The Greek poet Constantine Cavafy lived in England for seven years as a child and adolescent because the family business was there and, in 1974, the London Hellenic Society was instrumental in placing a plaque on the house in Queensborough Terrace, W2 where the Cavafys lived in the mid-1870s. The Brazilian statesman and lawyer Ruy Barbosa lived in Holland Park Gardens in the 1890s, and the Anglo-Brazilian Society has marked his stay with a plaque on No. 17. Quite a few plaques have outlasted their sponsors. On a building in Haymarket, once the Carlton Hotel, there is...