The first blue plaque was unveiled more than 150 years ago in 1867, on Holles Street in London, to mark the spot where the dashing Romantic poet Lord Byron was born. Now there are an estimated 45,000 plaques in Britain, and Mike Read, chairman of the British Plaque Trust, thinks it’s too many.
Blue plaques used to be the sole prerogative of the Society of Arts. The baton was passed to London County Council, and now rests with English Heritage, which puts up just 10 new plaques a year. It has strict rules: subjects need to have made an “important positive contribution to human welfare or happiness”, and they need to have been dead for at least 20 years; also the building in question must be “contemporary with or pre-date the association being commemorated”.
There are no restrictions on installing less official plaques, however, and local councils, literary societies and other interest groups have been quick to join in. Parallel plaque schemes have emerged, with an array of colours and a variety of more or less scrupulous selection criteria. One plaque in Oldham locates the site of “the first British fried chip”, and one on a building in Dover commemorates where David Copperfield, a fictional character invented by Charles Dickens, “rested on the doorstep”. It’s possible to commission your own bespoke “heritage plaque” for as little as £14.99.
Even Mike Read’s official-sounding British Plaque Trust was founded just five years ago in 2013 – and has already irritated purists by using screws instead of embedding its plaques flush with the walls.
If you’re feeling dismayed by this “plague of plaques” – as some have declared it – don’t fret too much. It only takes a modicum of common sense to gauge a plaque’s provenance. The organisation responsible generally announces itself, and we judge the plaque’s significance accordingly. If plaques don’t provide credentials, you naturally treat them with more caution.
To be honest, though, I feel these concerns are missing the point. It doesn’t really matter to me whether the person commemorated was a great statesman, a fictional character, a local legend or a national treasure. The more plaques the better, I say. They are the most beautifully simple and lo-tech way of evoking the layered history of a location, and they greatly improve our experience of a city.
Plaques expand the imagination and animate the street. They concertina time. Reading a plaque, you become aware that you’re sharing the same airspace as other human beings, albeit separated by decades or even centuries. It’s particularly thrilling when you come across more than one plaque in quick succession. Their stories begin to interweave and the paving stones ring with the footsteps of a growing cast of characters. Your experience of the mundane city is transformed.
The jackpot is the double plaque, like those on the building on Brook Street in London that has been home at different times to both George Frederick Handel (1685-1759) and Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970), or the house on Fitzroy Square into which Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) moved less than 10 years after George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) moved out.
It doesn’t bother me if I don’t recognise the name on a plaque. In fact, a mysterious plaque’s brevity can be poetically evocative. Doreen Valiente (1922-1999) is commemorated in Brighton, for example, as “the mother of modern witchcraft”; Jane Burden (1839-1914) in Oxford is both “Pre-Raphaelite muse and embroiderer”; and Luke Howard (1772-1864) in Tottenham is the “namer of clouds”. Plaques remind us of the myriad stories that surround us in a city. They serve as representatives of countless other comings and goings in our shared urban landscape. So I am happy, for instance, to learn from a blue plaque that JRR Tolkien stayed in a hotel on the outskirts of Birmingham on his wedding night in 1916; it enhances my experience of the present.
One genre of blue plaques that I find particularly pleasing is the fictional plaque, like the one installed by the Society for the Promotion of Historic Buildings in Hornsey, north London, commemorating the fact that:
Carswell Prentice
1891-1964
inventor of the
supermarket trolley
stayed here
in September
1932
Carswell Prentice did not invent the trolley; in fact he never existed. And of course there’s the enigmatic Jacob von Hogflume, who has had several plaques that appear and disappear in different locations around the world. This sighting was recorded in Golden Square in London:
Jacob
von Hogflume
1864-1909
Inventor of time travel
lived here
in 2189
• Henry Eliot is the author of The Penguin Classics Book, Follow This Thread and, with Matt Lloyd-Rose, Curiocity: An Alternative A-Z of London.
