There is more to blue plaques than dead white men – and English Heritage knows it
Commemorative plaques on the facades of Britain’s buildings are an unlikely source of joy. Especially during the pandemic, when urban inhabitants have been more than usually reliant on foot power to get them around, a flash of ceramic sky blue – the colour favoured by English Heritage, which runs the most authoritative and well-known plaque scheme on the streets of London – can mean a momentary invitation to consider distant lives. Passing her house in Holland Park, for instance, one can imagine Radclyffe Hall weathering the scandal of the publication of The Well of Loneliness, her (suppressed) lesbian novel. Gay film-maker and activist Derek Jarman is commemorated by a plaque erected by Islington council to mark his home in the late 1960s. He has his English Heritage blue plaque, though, in Shad Thames, Southwark, London, where he lived and worked in the 1970s – and, incidentally, won the first Alternative Miss World competition, judged by a panel that included David Hockney.
Or take Ira Aldridge, the African American actor who settled in the south London suburb of Upper Norwood, we learn from his blue plaque, in the 1860s. What would he have had to say to the great composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who later lived not far away in South Norwood? The composer of The Song of Hiawatha was the first black person to be given a plaque under the English Heritage scheme, in 1975.