Britain’s blue plaques–or how to make history snooze-worthy

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Britain isn’t short on history, and it isn’t short of the impulse to celebrate it. Or at least some of it. The part of it that fits the dominant narrative, whatever that is at the moment. One of the least effective ways it’s found is the blue plaque scheme, which attaches–yes, you guessed it–blue plaques to walls commemorating people you may or may not have heard of. 

To learn more about this fascinating project, let’s quote Historic England, one of the assorted organizations that run the scheme: It “celebrates people from all walks of life who have made a significant contribution to human welfare or happiness; and/or have made an exceptional impact in their field, community or on society at large.”  

English Heritage, on the other hand, which runs the scheme in London, has it celebrating “the links between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked.”

We won’t get in between those two explanations. They can settle their differences in whatever way they find fitting.

Irrelevant photo: The Bude Canal on a (rare) sunny day. Apologies for the photo quality. It seems to be a WordPress problem that’s cropped up in the last few weeks.

The scheme

In British, scheme doesn’t imply anything scheming or underhanded. A scheme’s a plan–something systematic, and this particular scheme has been around for a while. The first plaques were put up in 1867. Since then, the London part of it has been handed from one organization to another. Unless you work for one of them, I’m reasonably sure you don’t care which they are. The national scheme is run by Historic England. But smaller cities don’t have to feel left out: they can find some local group to put up their own blue plaques.

The plaques say things like, “________ lived here from _______ to ___________.” Some of them say what the person did. A few don’t–you’re expected to know. Either way, the focus is on the here-ness of it all. It’s a low-key way of saying, Listen, dunderhead, you’re on a historic site. Be impressed.

Or something along those lines. Maybe they’re really saying, We’re so rich in history that all we need to do is put up a small blue plaque to commemorate it. Eat your heart out, foreigners. 

It’s all in the interpretation, isn’t it?

I’ve seen a Charles Dickens-related plaque that commemorates a house that used to stand someplace near where the plaque now is. It struck me as a bit forlorn.

Not all the plaques commemorate English or British figures. One of the earliest commemorates Napoleon III, who lived in exile in London, where he slotted himself neatly into high society. 

The people they commemorate are also not all famous. Commemoratees include a theatrical wigmaker, the woman who taught ju-jitsu to the Suffragettes, a bare-knuckle boxing champ, a homing pigeon, and Dolly the Sheep–the first animal to be born by cloning.

 

Unofficial plaques

But nobody gets to set a limit on blue plaques, and it’s possible–even legal–to put up unofficial ones. 

In Norfolk, the Common Lot theatre group discovered that only 25 of the city’s 300 blue plaques commemorated women and set out to remedy the imbalance, commemorating rebel women of Norwich. Their women they commemorate include:  

  • The 16-year-old Emma de Gaudar, who’s said to have held Norwich Castle against a siege by William the Conqueror
  • The butterfly collector Margaret Fountaine
  • Suffragette Mabel Clarkson, who became a lord mayor of Norwich and a city councillor before women achieved the vote
  • Dorothy Jewson, the first female Labour MP, who attended Norwich High School for Girls
  • Women thrown out of a Quaker meeting house for being profane and opinionated for talking about women’s rights
  • And the former location of a ducking stool for women accused of witchcraft

In Hull, Alternative Heritage set up a plaque saying, “Our brand of mavericks and creatives decided to celebrate Hull’s history, whether factual or fictitious.”

I could get to like these people.

They go on to say, “Official English Heritage plaques can only be commissioned for a proposed recipient 20 years after their death, through strict criteria. But what about the living legends and stories that make our city special today? Here at Drunk Animal Creative Studio, we designed a series of our own plaques, fittingly titled ‘Alternative Heritage.’

“Our plaques celebrate our history, from Hull’s charismatic folk to lore spread in playgrounds. Whether factual or fictitious, the contents of the plaques come straight from the heart of Hull.”

So what have they put up? One plaque says, “Goodbye, 2020. You won’t be missed.” Another says, “On this spot, 1918. Alf hugged his wife for the first time in four years. He was lucky – thousands across the country never got to hug their loved ones again.”

Their site includes a map of plaques around the city and a form you can use to propose a plaque.

 

The Liz Truss plaque

The reason I got started on blue plaques is that someone’s put up a blue plaque outside the shop where the lettuce that outlasted Liz Truss was bought.

What am I talking about? Liz Truss is Britain’s shortest-serving prime minister. In less than two months, during 2022, her bare-knuckle budget proposed doing everything Conservative politicians had talked about but hesitated to do in any unrestrained way: slash taxes and spending without worrying about how the numbers would add up. In next to no time at all, the country was teetering on the brink of recession. The pound tanked. The markets had multiple nervous breakdowns. The cost of government borrowing shot up. Mortgage deals fell through. People who ran pension funds–or who had pensions in those funds–came unglued.

Headline writers, on the other hand, had a field day. 

Truss’s popularity fell so low they had to dig trenches in the newsroom floor. Then some genius at one of the newspapers bought a head of lettuce, dropped a blond wig on it, and trained a live cam at it, asking who’d last longer, Liz or Lettuce.

The lettuce, famously, won. And is now commemorated with a highly unofficial blue plaque of its very own. Truss, meanwhile, is promoting a book about how to save the West. The rest of the world, presumably, isn’t worth bothering with.

How well is it selling? In its first week (I haven’t found more recent data), it was 70 on the bestseller list, behind an air fryer cookbook and RuPaul’s memoir, with 2,228 copies sold. Given the name recognition you get as a former prime minister, that’s not great, although I’ll admit it leaves my novels in the dust. On the other hand, I’m not followed by pictures of lettuce the way she is.

28 thoughts on “Britain’s blue plaques–or how to make history snooze-worthy”

    • You will always be welcome to follow me. I promise. And I read the plaques too–and come away knowing somewhere between nothing and not much more than I did before I read them. But then, maybe I’m not the target audience. They may need someone with a bit more reverence.

      For poetry, 10 may be respectable. A neighbor’s short stories sold, I think, 2 copies, and one was to her sister. It’s a pretty dismal world out there in BookBiz land.

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    • If you ask Lord Google, he will–after a bit of fussing and refining your search–lead you to photos of the plaques, so you can visit them from the comfort of your couch. It lacks excitement and romance, I admit, but there’s the miracle of modern technology for you: lots of things become possible and you wonder why you cared.

      Me, I’m predictably drawn to the unofficial plaques. Especially the lettuce, which is a joke that I predict will never die.

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  3. Thank you so much for sharing the existence of Alternative Heritage. It has been one of those week’s that feels like a month and I am burned out but everything about Alternative Heritage and their mission has warmed the cockles of my soul. I love it.

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  4. Delightful -I may Google the blue plaques (or is it plagues ? Spellcheck can’t tell which one I meant.)

    The US has it’s share – roadside markers that are a family joke of Dad stopping at every one on a long driving trip. Second only to those who visit Civil War battlefields. These actually spawned a lot of historians.

    Added humor always helps ! Thanks for providing even more !

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    • Oh, right, those roadside plaques. A plague of plaques? Sorry–markers. I should’ve thought about them. They at least make some gesture in the direction of telling the story, although I can’t remember ever coming away from reading one any wiser than I went in.

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  5. The unofficial plaques sou d great. Yes, I read the blue plaques. They are mostly for men in Derry, but there are a few for women (hymn writers). I didn’t realise you had to be dead 20 years, which is why why there are not ones to more recent people. Of course we have murals in Derry. There are unofficial commerations to people murdered by the British army and ‘volunteers’ (members of paramilitary organisations).

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  6. Britain’s plaques sound a little more user friendly than the ones we have around Michigan. Most of them are a paragraph or more long. Maybe it’s because Michigan has less history, leading to more verbiage.

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    • Whereabouts are you? I’m besotted by history but by the time plaques and historical markers are approved by a few thousand politicians and bureaucrats, all the life and the story have been drained out of them–at least in my experience of them.

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    • I asked Lord Google to translate kotztk, and it was well worth the effort. I’d say historical correctness is always disputable. Which is why historians continue to write books about subjects that other people wrote about years before, and in this case the location may be wrong but surely he did somewhere.

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      • … mmbmbl … “correctness” ? We know pretty well when happened what where, who did what when, there are no new sources. What changes is “our” view on them source materials, the questions asked. Hence the blab about “the end of history” is, and always will be, nonsense. For the rest monsieur Voltaire invented “Geschichtsphilosophie”, philosophie de l’histoire.

        History is always the history of historiography – there, that truism had to be said.

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        • Periodically, though, someone finds a new source deep in an archive somewhere. Or thinks to compare the topic with–I don’t know, the quantity of wine imported through Southport in the 16th century. Or the marriage records in Kent in that same century. And lo and behold! a new light is thrown on whatever our topic was.

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