The missing blue plaques for London's women – and what to do about it
They hadn’t invented women when the UK’s first house plaque scheme began in 1866. Or not so you’d notice. The first female plaque went up ten years later, in honour of the actress Sarah Siddons, but by 1905 there were still only five women honoured, including the writer George Eliot – real name Mary Ann Evans.
English Heritage, which has administered what we now call the London blue plaques scheme since 1986, is keen to redress the balance. They have recently asked the public to nominate women for consideration by the panel that chooses 12 new plaques a year. While the call has sparked some controversy, for those of us, whether travellers or residents, who love that direct shot of history you get when you see a plaque on the side of a building, it’s about time things evened up.
The woman in charge is Anna Eavis, curatorial director for English Heritage, who took responsibility for the scheme in 2014 when there was one woman on the panel of 12. Now there are 129 plaques to women (out of a total of 900) and five women on the panel, including a conductor, a scientist and historians specialising in medicine, art and architectural history.
It doesn’t make it any easier. According to Eavis, the criteria are the same across the board. "Women have to have been dead for at least 20 years, the building has to exist and to be in Greater London and they have to have made an amazing contribution in some way," she says. The building itself must be suitable, consent must be attained and the blue plaque must be visible from the public highway.
Then there’s the London issue: the scheme doesn’t cover the entire country, although English Heritage did try to expand it a few years ago. The difficulty was partly to do with the fact that most towns and cities now have their own schemes. Even London has separate schemes in the Cities of London and Westminster, and in many of the boroughs.
So when you think of women to nominate, it’s not that simple. Take the Kent-born playwright and spy Aphra Behn, who swashbuckled her way through Restoration London, knew the Earl of Rochester and worked for the King. No house survives.
Or how about Artemesia Gentileschi, the brilliant Baroque painter, who called out a fellow artist for rape in her native Rome in 1612, enduring a trial that lasted months? She lived in London for three years, working with her father on the Queen’s House, Greenwich – but it’s Grade I-listed and part of a Unesco World Heritage Site.
Eleanor Coade ran a Georgian ceramics business so successful that she rattled Josiah Wedgwood – but nothing remains of her factory by Westminster Bridge. Mrs Banks in Mary Poppins deserves one for her suffragette activities – but you can’t have fictional characters. The Victorian social reformer Ada Salter is a possibility: she lived in the Bermondsey Settlement, was London’s first female councillor and Britain’s first female Labour mayor and lost her only child to one of the epidemics raging at the time – but she already has a plaque at her birthplace in Raunds and a sweet statue by the Thames.
I started asking people who they’d suggest beyond the boundaries of London. The actress Maxine Peake suggested Betty Tebbs, Preston-born activist and trade unionist – but she only died in 2017 (aged 98 – future nomination, surely). Gillian Murphy, curator for equality, rights and citizenship at the LSE Women’s Library, suggested a group of unsung suffragettes in Essex, including the sisters Kate and Louise Lilley, part of the large and supportive family that owned Lilley and Skinner shoes. Their hunger strike medals are in the Museum of London and their home in Clacton still exists, though it’s now flats.
The Women’s Engineering Society suggested their first practising president, Verena Holmes, Bsc (Eng), born in Kent in 1889, who served an apprenticeship at an aero engineering firm in Lincoln before the Great War, was retained and went on to design everything from locomotive valves to a pneumothorax apparatus for treating tuberculosis.
And I’d suggest the architect Elisabeth Scott, part of the Gilbert Scott dynasty, who designed the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, the first significant building by a female architect in Britain. Or Margaret Cavendish, dismissively known to her contemporaries as ‘Mad Madge’, but a brilliant mathematician who lived with at Bolsover Castle, Derbyshire. Though it’s possible they have plaques I haven’t seen.
Right now there are three female blue plaques in the pipeline, pending owner permissions: the SOE operative Noor Inayat Khan, the wartime actress Margaret Lockwood and the formidable explorer, archaeologist and writer Gertrude Bell.
Time to get our thinking caps on UK, especially in the under-represented outer boroughs of Greater London – just think what our city could look like by 2096.