Blue Plaque

Blue plaque is not something that stains your teeth if you are a Conservative. It is a commemorative plaque put on the outside of a house in London that has been lived in by someone distinguished.

The Spectator this week has an article in praise of them and I will, if I may, extract a few salient facts of which I’d been unaware. The person being commemorated must have been dead for at least twenty years, they cost £4,000 each, are self-cleaning and a panel of historians meets three times a year to decide on new plaques. The self-cleaning apparently is because of their convex surface; anyway, an excellent piece by Ysenda Maxtone Graham.

Baron’s Court Road has two of them, in addition to an apostrophe that the tube station does not have.

Baroness Orczy, author of The Scarlet Pimpernel, lived in my street but there is no plaque – maybe too foreign (Hungarian)? Anyway, I saw for the first time this week a plaque in West Kensington when I was taking a different route to get to Rassell’s Nursery to buy a basil plant. I was, as often is the case, completely clueless about this family but Wiki came to the rescue. The most famous member taught Richard Bonynge, initiated the idea for the Sydney Opera House and had the idea in WW II of asking composers to write fanfares to raise morale – Aaron Copland submitted Fanfare for the Common Man. He is Eugene Aynsley Goossens, born in 1893, a composer and conductor who worked in England, America and Australia.

The plaques were initiated by the Society of Arts in 1867. In 1901 they became the responsibility of London County Council, which turned into the Greater London Council, and since 1986 English Heritage has been in charge, deciding to disfigure them with its logo. The early, quite rare, plaques were not actually blue.