The Guardian view on blue plaques: time to redress the balance – The Guardian

Commemorative plaques on the facades of Britains buildings are an unlikely source of joy. Especially during the pandemic, when urban inhabitants have been more than usually reliant on foot power to get them around, a flash of ceramic sky blue the colour favoured by English Heritage, which runs the most authoritative and well-known plaque scheme on the streets of London can mean a momentary invitation to consider distant lives. Passing her house in Holland Park, for instance, one can imagine Radclyffe Hall weathering the scandal of the publication of The Well of Loneliness, her (suppressed) lesbian novel. Gay film-maker and activist Derek Jarman is commemorated by a plaque erected by Islington council to mark his home in the late 1960s. He has his English Heritage blue plaque, though, in Shad Thames, Southwark, London, where he lived and worked in the 1970s and, incidentally, won the first Alternative Miss World competition, judged by a panel that included David Hockney.

Or take Ira Aldridge, the African American actor who settled in the south London suburb of Upper Norwood, we learn from his blue plaque, in the 1860s. What would he have had to say to the great composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who later lived not far away in South Norwood? The composer of The Song of Hiawatha was the first black person to be given a plaque under the English Heritage scheme, in 1975.

Commemorating history is now, more than ever, a contentious issue. A recent analysis by the Guardians data team found that only 2% of the blue plaques in English Heritages scheme commemorate black people. That rather pitiful figure, though, may somewhat obscure the fact that the charity, which took over the then 120-year-old project in 1986 after the abolition of the Greater London Council, has made important strides towards changing the balance. A working party, set up in 2016, has been specifically encouraging nominations for plaques commemorating black and Asian historical figures, as well as women and those from working-class backgrounds. The result is that for the past two years a quarter of the plaques unveiled have commemorated notable black and Asian people. The age of an exclusive focus on dead white men is over.

If progress seems frustratingly slow, that is partly the nature of the process: after nomination by a member of the public, there will be rigorous historical research to confirm the association of a person with a building or buildings; the putting-forward of the proposed plaque to a selection panel; the not insubstantial task of gaining permissions from property owners and councils; and then the work of designing and making the beautiful ceramic roundels. This can take three years. Historian David Olusoga (who sits on the Scott Trust, which owns this newspaper) has made some sensible suggestions about the possibility of adjusting the criteria to make it easier for black people to be commemorated by plaques, by marking significant locations for meetings or events rather than just dwelling places. These ideas should be taken seriously and the charity encouraged to redouble its efforts so that those who pound the streets have yet more invitations to pause, to marvel, and to imagine.

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The Guardian view on blue plaques: time to redress the balance - The Guardian