On a sodden morning in early July last year, I made my way to 1 Collingham Road in Kensington, west London. Despite the weather, a crowd of spectators had gathered on the pavement outside the imposing Victorian corner house. The late American singer Adelaide Hall, dubbed “the first lady of jazz” by her admirers, had lived at the address for 27 years, between 1952 and 1979. Though raised in Brooklyn, Hall, whose fans included Ella Fitzgerald and Elisabeth Welch, had called London home for more than half a century before her death in 1993, aged 92. “I do like London very much,” she said in a 1980 interview. “I like it because it’s quiet — and I like the quiet life.”
The unveiling of the blue plaque commemorating Hall’s time here was scheduled for 12:30. Several of Hall’s friends were in attendance, along with the broadcaster and musician YolanDa Brown and historian Stephen Bourne, author of a biography of Hall. “Having known her, I don’t doubt that she would be absolutely thrilled,” Bourne beamed. “I’m sure she is smiling wherever she is.” After speeches and anecdotes, one of Hall’s former theatrical companions tugged on a rope to reveal the blue and white ceramic roundel bearing the legend ADELAIDE HALL 1901-1993. Singer. Lived here.
The annual goal of the blue plaque scheme, broadly speaking, is for 12 new plaques to be erected in London commemorating houses where celebrated figures once lived. But — like any other means of public memorial — the decisions are occasionally controversial. Who is — and who isn’t — memorialised in this way, and why? The decision is never neutral.
In 2021, there was an outcry over the scheme’s lack of diversity. Data showed that only 2 per cent of London’s plaques commemorated Black people. English Heritage, the charity that has run the scheme since 1986, had set up a working party to improve matters in 2016, with an emphasis on encouraging public nominations for Black and Asian figures, but given the number unveiled each year, progress was slow. The intervening years have seen some gradual change. Bob Marley, the footballer Laurie Cunningham and suffragette Princess Sophia Duleep Singh have all been commemorated, among others. Two plaques for Black and Asian figures were unveiled in 2024, however the percentage still hovers around 5 per cent.
In 2023, the charity also pressed for an increase in plaques commemorating women. According to their own analysis, more than 85 per cent were for men. It wasn’t, as Anna Eavis, the charity’s curatorial director put it at the time, “about rummaging around [for figures] in the 18th and 19th century”. Instead, she was more interested “in ensuring that as time rolls on, we are capturing female figures who are undoubtedly making a contribution in more recent history”.
In 2024 a record number of women were commemorated: 10, including Diana Beck, the UK’s first female neurosurgeon, and Irene Barclay, the first woman to qualify as a chartered surveyor, alongside Hall.
The list of new plaques to be unveiled in 2025 is due to be announced in February. But while the long-term aim is to significantly shift the balance, there is some way to go, explains Professor William Whyte, the current head of the blue plaque panel — historians, broadcasters, writers and academics — that meets to discuss new additions. To be considered, 20 years must have passed from a candidate’s death, so: “We’re just catching up with the generation of women who emerged in the 1930s and 40s. Many are now able to be [nominated].”
The first blue plaque was mounted on Lord Byron’s house at 24 Holles Street, Cavendish Square, in 1867, likely making it the oldest such initiative in the world. Initially administered by the Society of Arts (the forebear of today’s Royal Society of Arts), responsibility passed to the long defunct London County Council at the turn of the 20th century. The LCC years saw the selection criteria stiffened up and the scheme given the cumbersome “Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London” title. Its first effort commemorated the historian Thomas Babington Macaulay. Other heavy hitters followed, from Charles Dickens to George Eliot. Various designs and colours were experimented with during the period, which explains the occasional remaining chocolate brown effort.
The simplified blue design became the standard in 1921. When the LCC was abolished more than 40 years later, its successor, the Greater London Council, took up the mantle. When it too was dissolved, English Heritage stepped in to save the scheme.
Hundreds of proposals are submitted by members of the public every year. Current debates are kept closely guarded, with the committee meeting three times a year to sift through the public nominations and winnow them down into a shortlist. Debate, occasionally heated, often follows. Some of the rules are simple. At least 20 years must have passed from a candidate’s death and there must be at least one building associated with the figure remaining in Greater London. No more than two plaques are allowed on any building, which must survive in a form “the commemorated person would have recognised”, a pleasingly vague formulation.
“If you think about it, it’s a very Victorian [idea] in all sorts of ways,” says Whyte. “It [was a] time of the memorialisation of great men — and it was largely men then . . . What is extraordinary is how it has renewed itself for each generation who seem to find new purposes and focus.”
The English Heritage scheme is not to be confused with the recently inaugurated National Blue Plaque Scheme run by Historic England — no relation — which put up its first plaque last May, at George Harrison’s birthplace in Wavertree, Liverpool. English Heritage had attempted its own national rollout in 2000, scrapping it five years later after considering much of the ground “already covered” by rival schemes.
Today, there are more than 1,000 English Heritage-administered plaques across the capital, from the heart of Bloomsbury to the outer fringes of Croydon. English Heritage has created the “Blue Plaques of London” app with guided walks and an interactive map to locate those nearby. I have spent a considerable amount of my time gawping at heavy-set Victorian houses in South Norwood (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the 19th-century composer, squats at 30 Dagnall Park) and discreetly moneyed west London terraces (Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the composer’s namesake and 19th-century poet, is baked into the front of 7 Addison Bridge Place, West Kensington).
I also travelled to Embankment, on the Thames riverside, to meet Howard Spencer, senior historian on the blue plaques scheme. The first stop on our tour of the area’s dense cluster of plaques was 1 Robert Street, a few hundred yards from the Strand. This is where, in September 2023, the charity had unveiled the 1,000th blue plaque, dedicated to the one-time headquarters of the Women’s Freedom League, a suffragist organisation that called the building home in 1908-15. At 36 Craven Street, we escaped the dank days weather by stepping into Benjamin Franklin House, itself the host of a heavy old LCC plaque dedicated to the man himself.
Spencer’s enthusiasm remained undimmed as we trudged in the rain past bemused tourists and office workers. At 43 Villiers Street, I took in Rudyard Kipling’s plaque above an extravagantly tatty “Gifts and Souvenirs” store. The enduring appeal was not so hard to understand, according to Whyte. “The process of public engagement, serious academic scholarship and debate is what I think keeps the scheme alive.”
Nominate a plaque here
Find out about our latest stories first — follow @ft_houseandhome on Instagram
