The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Travel
On the blue plaque trail
Walking tours celebrate 150 years of historic landmarks
‘The thing to remember about blue plaques,” said John Precedo, “is that they’re not all blue, they’re not all round, and they’re not all English Heritage.” He should know. Three years ago the 46-year-old media analyst, who tweets as @ BluePlaquesGuy, got hooked on the plaques affixed to hundreds of our buildings (most, but not all of them, in London) acknowledging a link to the past, usually to someone of note who lived or worked there.
Next weekend, English Heritage is running a series of London guided walks to celebrate 150 years since the first panel of selectors met to decide who should get a plaque. Back in 1866 it was the only scheme of its kind in the world, as far as we know, inspired by a speech made by the Liberal MP William Ewart. The first subject was Lord Byron, a rather surprising choice in prim Victorian London, though sadly both plaque and building are now gone.
Even all these years on these beguiling dots of history add hugely to the experience of exploring the capital, for visitors and Londoners alike. Now this year’s tranche of new plaque names, including Freddie Mercury in Feltham, Margot Fonteyn in Covent Garden, and Tommy Cooper in Chiswick, takes the total number of plaques in London to more than 900. While for Precedo, the pleasure is more in the research than in finding the plaques, for me, it’s in rounding a corner to find a building you might have walked straight past suddenly freighted with interest by the presence of a blue roundel. I always cross to see who it is. Suddenly that blankfaced house loses its fourth wall as the imagination fires, taking you inside, in your mind’s eye, to imagine Anna Maria Garthwaite weaving Spitalfields silk, or Miss Fonteyn practising demiplies in her flat. You can also use the plaques to plot a route across the capital. Take the Bedford Estate in London WC2: starting with Virginia Woolf and George Bernard Shaw in artsy Fitzroy Square, you can potter on through Bloomsbury’s streets, via the former homes of scientist Charles Darwin, the natural philosopher Henry Cavendish and Daphne du Maurier’s father George, to find, just south of Russell Square, the plaque for Hans Sloane, the physician and founder of the British Museum.
Some areas have dense clusters of plaques, such as Cheyne Walk beside the Thames in Chelsea which was popular with writers and artists – the novelists George Eliot and Mrs Gaskell among them, as well as the suffragist Sylvia Pankhurst. And look out for the many establishment figures adorning Queen Anne’s Gate in Westminster.
The scheme isn’t without its flaws. The latest panel of selectors stands accused of being too white and male, and women and different races are still under-represented on plaques, although that is slowly improving.
Just remember, as you start hunting, that the shapes and colours of plaques can be confusing, as John Precedo pointed out. I’m doing one of the anniversary walks, which includes plaques to an 18th-century caricaturist, an American inventor and two legendary diarists, features a brown plaque, a bronze plaque, a stone plaque and two rectangles, some of them listing several names.
This is because the scheme, now run by English Heritage, has had several custodians, including the Royal Society of Arts (formerly the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). Initially they were a delicate blue and white with a white surround, later a rich brown, and a few of them are multicoloured.
Later, there were London County Council plaques decorated with laurel leaves, and later still plaques with Greater London Council around the rim. English Heritage took control in 1986, established the blue roundel with a white rim and a portcullis symbol, and has run it ever since.
They all add to the gaiety of city life, though English Heritage does employ strict criteria: the person must have been dead for 20 years and, perhaps most importantly, they must have lived or worked in that specific building. “It means there’s a real connection,” says Precedo simply. “The people were really there, or the event actually happened in that building. That really matters to me.”