London's blue plaques: who runs them and how to tell an official one

What the blue plaques are

A London blue plaque marks a building where a notable person lived or worked. The official scheme is run by English Heritage, which describes it as linking "the people of the past with the buildings of the present", and it began in 1866. English Heritage counts more than 1,000 plaques across the capital, on buildings it calls "humble and grand".[1]

The scheme is older than English Heritage. According to English Heritage, it has run the scheme since 1986, when it was already 120 years old; before that it passed through three bodies in turn: the (Royal) Society of Arts, the London County Council and the Greater London Council.[2]

How to tell an official plaque

London's walls carry many plaques, and not all of them belong to this scheme. English Heritage gives a simple test: an official plaque bears the name of one of the four bodies that have run the scheme, the Society of Arts, the London County Council, the Greater London Council or English Heritage. Its plaque search will also confirm whether a given plaque is part of the scheme.[2]

Colour is not a reliable test. "Not all plaques in the official English Heritage scheme are blue," English Heritage says: the first plaques were blue, but early makers also tried brown, terracotta, green, bronze, lead and stone, and squares and rectangles as well as roundels. The blue roundel became the standard design only after the Second World War,[2] although English Heritage dates the simplified modern design to 1938, by an unnamed student of the Central School of Arts and Crafts who was paid four guineas.[3]

The reverse also holds: a blue plaque is not automatically an official one. English Heritage says many local councils, civic societies and other organisations run similar schemes, often with different criteria, and points to OpenPlaques as a way to search them.[2] It names Westminster City Council's Green Plaques and the Nubian Jak Community Trust, which commemorates prominent black historical figures, as active schemes.[4]

The City of London is a separate case

The City of London, the historic square mile, has its own arrangement. English Heritage says the City holds only one plaque from its scheme, and it is not blue: a terracotta plaque to Samuel Johnson in Gough Square, put up by the Society of Arts in 1876. Three years later, it says, the Corporation of the City of London took responsibility for commemorating historic sites in the square mile, an agreement that still stands.[3] Any other plaque in the City belongs to a different scheme.

Who gets a plaque, and how

English Heritage's selection criteria are specific.[4]

• At least 20 years must have passed since the person died.
• At least one building associated with them must survive in Greater London, outside the City of London.
• The building must survive in a form the person would have recognised, and be visible from a public highway.
• Buildings with many personal associations, such as churches, schools and theatres, are not normally considered.
• No building may carry more than two plaques, and each person gets only one plaque.

Nominations come from the public. English Heritage says its Blue Plaques Panel meets three times a year to decide the shortlist, that a turned-down proposal cannot be reconsidered for ten years, and that once a nomination is shortlisted it usually takes two to three years for the plaque to go up, because of research and the need for the building owner's consent.[4]

The insistence on a surviving building is deliberate. English Heritage explains that plaques celebrate the relationship between a person and a place, so it now only erects one where a building closely associated with the person survives.[2] It also says plaques give no legal protection to a building, although it cites cases where the association a plaque highlighted helped a building survive or be listed.[3]

Rules that were once looser

The current rules were not always applied. The oldest surviving plaque, English Heritage says, is to Napoleon III, put up in 1867 while he was still ruling France, which the 20-year rule would now forbid. The first plaque of all, to Lord Byron in the same year, was lost when his Holles Street house was demolished in 1889, and English Heritage adds that recent research found no clear evidence of which Holles Street house he actually lived in.[3]

Some houses carry two official plaques; English Heritage counts 18, including 20 Maresfield Gardens for Sigmund and Anna Freud. And some people have more than one, from the years before the one-plaque rule: English Heritage names Mahatma Gandhi with two, and Lord Palmerston, William Gladstone and William Makepeace Thackeray with three surviving plaques each.[3]

Who is commemorated

English Heritage is open about the scheme's imbalance: only 15 per cent of London's blue plaques celebrate women. It says that since launching a "plaques for women" campaign in 2016, more than half of the people awarded plaques have been women.[1]

What XTOUR does not do with plaques

XTOUR does not list individual plaques or treat plaque buildings as places to visit. A plaque marks a link between a person and a building; it does not make the building open to the public, and XTOUR has not verified access to any of them. English Heritage's plaque search is the place to find a plaque.

Outside London, English Heritage says a separate plaque scheme for the rest of England is run by Historic England.[2] XTOUR has not read Historic England's own pages on that scheme, so it describes the scheme only in English Heritage's words. The English Heritage pages say nothing about Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland, which have their own heritage bodies, and XTOUR makes no claim about plaque schemes there.