The idea of placing commemorative plaques on the houses of the great and the good was first mooted in 1863 by William Ewart. Ewart was a Liberal MP whose most significant achievement was the passing of the Public Libraries Act of 1850, which he had introduced as a private member’s bill the previous year. In putting forward the idea of commemorative plaques he wrote that ‘the places which had been the residences of the ornaments of their history could not but be precious to all thinking Englishmen’. (Ewart himself now has his own Blue Plaque in Eaton Place, erected 100 years after he first proposed the idea.) Sir Henry Cole, the first director of what we now know as the Victoria and Albert Museum, was one of those who most vigorously championed Ewart’s proposal. Ewart’s original intention had been that the government would fund a plaque scheme, but the administration of the day declined to do so. The Royal Society of Arts (RSA) stepped into the breach and in 1864 formed a committee to oversee the choosing and erection of the first plaques. The committee was enthusiastic about the idea that the plaques might give pleasure to ‘travellers up and down in omnibuses etc’, and that they ‘might sometimes prove an agreeable and instructive mode of beguiling a somewhat dull and not very rapid progress through the streets’ but, as committees do, it took time to turn its words into actions. It was not until 1867 that the first plaque was erected under the auspices of the RSA. This was placed on 24 Holles Street, once the home of Lord Byron and now, sadly, demolished.
The erection of plaques under the RSA was a slow and stately process. By 1901, when the scheme was taken over by the London County Council (LCC), thirty-six plaques had been put up in thirty-four years. Many of these have now disappeared, the victims of development, demolition and wartime bombs. The oldest plaques still in place are those to Napoleon III in King Street and to the poet John Dryden in Gerrard Street – both date from 1875. Under the LCC the speed with which plaques were erected quickened significantly; they were in charge of the scheme for sixty-four years and put up more than 250 plaques in that period. When, in 1965, the LCC metamorphosed into the Greater London Council (GLC), the new organisation took responsibility for the plaques. Under the GLC the geographical and cultural range of the plaques both expanded. Plaques were erected in outlying London boroughs that had not been under the jurisdiction of the LCC, and there was a more populist choice of individuals deemed worthy of commemoration. (Somebody at the GLC seemed to have a particular fondness for old music-hall stars. At least half a dozen were given their own plaques in the GLC years.) In 1985, with the abolition of the GLC, a new home had to be found for the Blue Plaque scheme (as it was now popularly known) and the Local Government Act of that year gave responsibility to English Heritage.
For thirty years English Heritage have continued to run the scheme and they have put up a further 360 plaques. Currently the decisions about which people should and should not be commemorated are made by the Blue Plaques Panel, which meets three times a year under the chairmanship of Professor Ronald Hutton. Other members of the panel include Sir Peter Bazalgette, Greg Dyke, Professor Jane Glover and the former Poet Laureate Sir Andrew Motion. In 2012, there were a number of newspaper reports, most of them inaccurate, suggest
