London's first blue plaque honoured Lord Byron, and it was not even blue for long
The world's oldest scheme for marking famous people's homes started in London in 1867 with a plaque at Lord Byron's birthplace. That house was torn down in 1889, the maker switched the colour to chocolate brown to save money, and the earliest surviving plaque belongs instead to Napoleon III in St James's.
The politician William Ewart conceived the idea in 1863 and launched it with Henry Cole and the Society of Arts, which put up 35 plaques in assorted shapes and colours, fewer than half of which survive. The actor Sarah Siddons became the first woman honoured, in 1876; her plaque was rescued when her Marylebone house came down and now sits in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The City of London has handled its own plaques since 1879, a split that still holds.
The London County Council took over in 1901 and made the plaques uniformly blue with a laurel wreath. In 1938 an unnamed student at its Central School of Arts and Crafts produced a cleaner design with larger lettering, soon given the white border used ever since. No plaques went up during either world war. Its successor, the Greater London Council, added 252 plaques and widened the range of people honoured, including Mary Seacole and Sylvia Pankhurst. English Heritage has run the scheme since 1986; funding cuts suspended it in 2013 before private donors revived it in 2014, prompting four panel members to resign. The 1,000th plaque, for the Women's Freedom League offices, went up in 2023.
The rules are strict. The person must have been dead at least 20 years, be regarded as eminent in their field and have lived or worked in the actual building, which must still stand without radical alteration and be visible from the street. Nobody gets more than one in London. Only about a third of proposals are approved, and a shortlisted case takes around three years to reach the front of the queue. Since 2015 each plaque has been made by hand by the potter Ned Heywood in Chepstow.
A national version returned under Historic England. Its first plaque, unveiled in Ilkley on 23 February 2024, honours Daphne Steele, who in 1964 became the NHS's first Black matron, and George Harrison's Liverpool childhood home followed that May.
Source: Blue plaque
