38 CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 JOHN PENDLEBURY and LOES VELDPAUS Blue plaques for inspiring pioneers In the face of a lack of diversity in blue-plaque schemes, a programme in Tyne and Wear commemorates notable women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. ‘Blue plaques’ are probably the best-known national physical commemoration scheme for marking places associated with notable figures or events.Yet only in 2024 have we seen the advent of a national (in England) blue plaques scheme, to be led by Historic England. English Heritage has managed a blue-plaques programme in London since 1986, inheriting a scheme that has its origins in 1866. English Heritage plaques are subject to strict criteria, including that any recipient must have been dead for at least 20 years, and that there should be a surviving building closely associated with the person in question. Outside London, provision is common but has always been patchy. Many local schemes have come and gone, operating in different ways to different designs and criteria, and many parts of the country have no provision at all. The authors of this article have undertaken a project in partnership with the Common Room of the North in the former metropolitan county of Tyne and Wear, to install five plaques to women who played a significant role in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Both of us are members of Newcastle City Council’s Historic Environment Advisory Panel (HEAP). One of the functions of HEAP is to advise the council on its sustained, if modest, blue plaques programme, with typically two to three plaques installed each year. An audit in 2019 revealed a shocking, if not surprising, lack of diversity in terms of plaque recipients. Of the 115 plaques then extant, 77 referred to an individual (a total of 52 individuals when accounting for multiple references to a few particularly celebrated figures). Six plaques in total memorialised women and one a black man, Frederick Douglass. This lack of diversity in blue-plaque programmes, or indeed heritage interpretation more broadly, is not particular to Newcastle. English Heritage acknowledges it as an issue in the London scheme, where 15 per cent of blue plaques celebrate women. London has had the scale and resources to address this, and since 2016 has been running a ‘plaques for women’ campaign. English Heritage is also trying to highlight significant figures linked to LGBTQ+ issues, disability and London’s black history. A systemic lack of diversity has stimulated other responses in various places across the country. Two of our students researched examples1. They found, for instance, in London, the Highgate Pink Plaques programme, which Susan Mary Auld’s shipbuilding designs included the D-Day landing vessels. 1 Laura Slevin and Erin Gallagher
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=