CONTEXT 181 : SEPTEMBER 2024 39 focuses on commemorating women, with less restrictive criteria than the English Heritage scheme. In York, a temporary rainbow-plaque project, with the aim of making ‘the city and its buildings become visibly queer²’, has led to a permanent plaque to Anne Lister, ‘lesbian and diarist’. In critical dialogue with existing memorialisation, staff and students at Exeter University have produced mock blue plaques to reinterpret commemorated figures from the history of the city, often in relation to the city’s colonial past. The temporary plaques are located alongside existing memorials or, for example, street names, highlighting the injustices that historical figures from the city may represent. We began to think about how plaque provision could be diversified in our own city, and a more representative history told. Inspired also by the ‘Rebel Women of Sunderland’ project, and a plaque produced by colleagues at Sunderland University to Dr Marion Phillips MP, and a plaque to Quaker women and their antislavery activity in Sunderland, we wanted to do something at a more regional scale. We sought to connect with the other Tyne and Wear authorities, asking whether and how plaques are installed in Gateshead, Sunderland, North Tyneside and South Tyneside. We had the additional objective of wanting to bring colleagues in these areas together to share knowledge and experience: the sort of cross-boundary sharing that has often been ground out of professional life as austerity has imposed more pressured and instrumental ways of working. It transpires that all five areas have a small programme of plaque installation, but each organised in different ways and to different criteria, although typically these are an adaption of those used by English Heritage. In Newcastle, the historic environment team advises HEAP on publicly received nominations on an annual cycle. South and North Tyneside councils both run plaque schemes, although with variations in detail from Newcastle. For example, in North Tyneside there are no published criteria or any established nomination process, and in practice there has been an emphasis on linked stories, such as the borough in the first world war. Sunderland City Council does not fund a scheme but seeks to facilitate the efforts of others and record those installed. In Gateshead, blue plaque installation is currently run by the local history society. We wanted to promote a more strategic and themed approach. The intention was not to interfere with proposals emerging in any of the five boroughs, but to acknowledge that incremental additions to plaque provision would probably never achieve more inclusive understandings of ² Kit Heyam (undated) Rainbow Plaques: making queer history visible https://www. sahgb.org.uk/features/ rainbow-plaquesmaking-queer-historyvisible ³ Newcastle University Policy Support QR fund, Towards more inclusive heritage policies: ‘blue plaques’ in Tyne and Wear (January 2022– June 2022) ⁴ We would like to thank our colleagues at the Common Room, Liz Mayes, Emily Tench, Josh Ansell, Lauren Sanderson, Luca/Lux Cepollaro and Alex Stewart. The Common Room was established in 2017 to lead the redevelopment and manage the assets of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. the history of place. We were fortunate in securing funding through our university³ sufficient to support the installation of one plaque in each of the five Tyne and Wear areas. We focused on a theme of women in STEM as an important and underrepresented area. The theme enabled us to work in partnership with the Common Room of the North⁴. In practice, most of the work of implementation was led by colleagues at the Common Room, who liaised with the five local authorities over potential recipients for plaques, undertook historical and location research, negotiated with owners and occupiers, navigated permissions, commissioned manufacture, organised installation events and, crucially, developed a wider interpretation scheme around ‘Inspiring Pioneers: celebrating women of the region who inspired great change’. None of us anticipated just how protracted an exercise this would be. It was a hard reminder that it can be a long haul from having an agreement on a suitable plaque recipient to celebrating installation. We first talked to the Common Room in January 2022, and the fifth and final plaque was installed on the Tyne Bridge in March 2024. Collectively, the plaques tell a story of women breaking into traditionally male professional spaces and opening the way for others to follow, a role Buchanan explicitly reflected upon. The plaque in Newcastle commemorated Rachel Parsons (1885–1956), and her mother Katherine, Lady Parsons (1859–1933). Rachel was one of the most remarkable women of her generation, both as an engineer and a feminist trailblazer. She was the first woman to study engineering at Cambridge University (1910–12) and the first to sit on the board of a major industrial concern, CA Parsons and Co. There, during the first world war, she trained female workers in the construction of steam turbines for energy generation. After the war, Rachel was a leading light in the National Council of Women, and in 1919 she became the founding president of the Women’s Engineering Society. Among the first women elected to the The blue plaques project has been carried out in partnership with the Common Room of the North, which is based at Neville Hall, Newcastle, formerly the home of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers. (Photo: Tracey Ainsley)
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MjgyMjA=