The English Heritage Guide to London's Blue Plaques: The Lives and Homes of London's Most Interesting Inhabitants. First Edition

By English Heritage

The official, illustrated English Heritage guide, with over 950 of London's most interesting inhabitants and their former homes brought to life.'If people want to find out about our London history, they can go and stand for a minute outside and look at a house where we know that person has lived - I think that's just wonderful.' Dame Judi Dench
Blue plaques, bearing names both familiar and intriguing, can be found all across the capital. From BOB MARLEY to ALAN TURING, VIRGINIA WOOLF to VINCENT VAN GOGH, MAHATMA GANDHI to EMMELINE PANKHURST, the plaques celebrate an incredible range of London's past residents.
Whether they be scientists, sports stars, artists, actors, inventors or politicians this revised and updated English Heritage guide reveals, with wit and insight, the stories of London's most extraordinary men and women and the homes in which they lived.
'The blue plaque helps us make poetry from the everyday, infusing the hard materials of the city with the feeling of lives lived: a memory of the past making the present richer.' Antony Gormley, Guardian

• Language: English
• Publisher: September Publishing
• Release date: Oct 27, 2016
• ISBN: 9781910463406

English Heritage

English Heritage cares for over 400 historic buildings, monuments and sites - from world-famous prehistoric sites to grand medieval castles, from Roman forts on the edges of the empire to a Cold War bunker. Through these, we bring the story of England to life for over 10 million people each year.

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WESTMINSTER AND PIMLICO

WESTMINSTER has been at the heart of national government since the eleventh century. Here are the Houses of Parliament and the broad sweep of Whitehall where the business of state is carried out. Although many of the offices date from the 19th century, there are notable clusters of plaques around the nearby 18th-century terraces of Smith Square and Queen Anne’s Gate.

From the mid-1800s, a new commercial centre grew up between Parliament Square and Victoria Station. This quarter is characterised by tall blocks of mansion flats, department stores and modern offices, and by the Roman Catholic Westminster Cathedral, built to designs by J. F. Bentley* between 1895 and 1903.

Pimlico, to the west, was built up in the mid-Victorian era as a genteel suburb for professional men; it aspired to – but never quite matched – the social standing of neighbouring Belgravia. The area’s stuccoed Italianate terraces and terraces of Smith Square and Queen squares are now intermingled with post-war local authority housing and subsequent developments.

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Illustration   SCOTLAND YARD

(1829–90) first headquarters of the Metropolitan Police

3–8 Whitehall Place, SW1A

NUMBERS 3–8 Whitehall Place, SW1, is a government building, currently occupied by the Department for Energy & Climate Change. It stands on the site of a row of small houses built in about 1820 that became, in September 1829, the headquarters of the new Metropolitan Police force. The police’s earliest nicknames – the ‘blue army’ and the ‘raw lobster gang’ – were soon replaced by ‘Peelers’ and ‘bobbies’; both derive from the force’s founder, Sir Robert Peel,* who lived at nearby 4 Whitehall Gardens. The back of 4 Whitehall Place was extended to form a police barracks, opening onto Great Scotland Yard. This entrance, used by the public and the press, caused the whole building to be known popularly as Scotland Yard from the early 1840s. By 1888, the police headquarters had overflowed into several adjacent buildings and in November 1890 the police moved into the purpose-built New Scotland Yard on Victoria Embankment, now known as the Norman Shaw Building after its eminent architect. When the Met moved in 1967 to their current headquaters at Broadway, off Victoria Street, they kept the name of New Scotland Yard.

Illustration   SIR HENRY MORTON STANLEY

(1841–1904) explorer and writer

6 (formerly 2) Richmond Terrace, SW1A 2NJ

STANLEY was born John Rowlands in Denbigh, north Wales, and spent much of his childhood in the workhouse. Emigrating to the United States in 1859, he was adopted by a cotton trader called Stanley, and became a journalist. Urged by the flamboyant proprietor of the New York Herald, Gordon Bennett, to ‘find Livingstone’, Stanley set off for Africa, and, having tracked down the famous explorer in 1871, greeted him with the famous line ‘Dr Livingstone, I presume?’ and a bottle of champagne. Stanley went on to author the hugely popular How I Found Livingstone (1872) and Through the Dark Continent (1878), and played a major, and now very controversial, part in opening up the Congo. Stanley resettled in England in 1890 and married the painter Dorothy (‘Dolly’) Tennant (1855-1926); they lived with Dolly’s formidable mother Gertrude at this house, then numbered 2 Richmond Terrace. It was handy for Parliament when he became a Liberal Unionist MP in 1895 and he continued to travel, lecture and write. It was at Richmond Terrace – just after hearing the chimes of Big Ben – that Stanley died. The house forms part of a terrace built in 1822–5 to designs by Henry Harrison; since reconstructive work in the 1980s only the facade remains, on which the plaque may be glimpsed from Whitehall through the security barrier.

Illustration   SIR MANSFIELD CUMMING

(1859–1923) first chief of the Secret Service

2 Whitehall Court, SW1A 2EJ

AN eager experimenter with secret writing, disguises and gadgets, Cumming always signed himself – in green ink – as ‘C’: James Bond’s boss ‘M’ is his fictional counterpart. Born Mansfield George Smith – he later changed his name – he enlisted in the Navy at the age of 12. He got the ‘tap on the shoulder’ to run the newly established Secret Service Bureau in 1909; two years later this split into home and foreign sections – the precursors of MI5 and MI6. Cumming led the foreign section, which from 1911 to 1922 had its headquarters – and a flat for the chief – at numbers 53 and 54, on the seventh floor of Whitehall Court – a vast Thames-side building resembling a Renaissance French chateau. The plaque is by the door to what is now the Royal Horse-guards Hotel. Cumming’s time there encompassed the First World War, so most of his work here related to intelligence-gathering in Germany. He lost a leg in a motor accident in 1914 that killed his son Alastair; afterwards Cumming used a scooter to propel him around the office, and would sometimes disconcert colleagues by jabbing a paper knife into his artificial limb to emphasise a point.

Illustration   T. E. LAWRENCE

(1888–1935) ‘Lawrence of Arabia’

14 Barton Street, SW1P 3NE

BARTON Street is a rare surviving example of early Georgian brown-brick terraced houses; it was developed by the actor Barton Booth in 1722. Two hundred years later, between March and August 1922, Thomas Edward Lawrence stayed at number 14, where he worked on the final draft of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926). With this colourful – some were to say fanciful – tale of his adventures as a solider and diplomat during the Arab revolt against Turkish rule (1916–18) Lawrence became a legend, inspiring the David Lean film of 1962.

Lawrence worked in a simply furnished attic, which he declared ‘the best-and-freest place I ever lived in’, and where ‘nobody has found me . . . despite efforts by callers and telephones’. His hideout was located above the office of architect Sir Herbert Baker (1862–1946), who recalled that Lawrence was largely nocturnal, and ‘refused all service and comfort, food, fire or hot water’; he ‘ate and bathed when he happened to go out’ and kept chocolate – ‘it required no cleaning up, he said’ – for emergency rations. Baker added, ‘We who worked in the rooms below never heard a sound; I would look up from my drawing-board in the evening sometimes to see him watching, gnomelike, with a smile; his smile that hid a tragedy.’

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Illustration   LORD REITH

(1889–1971) first Director-General of the BBC

6 Barton Street, SW1P 3NG

BORN in Scotland, the son of a church minister, John Charles Walsham Reith was knighted on his appointment to the Director-Generalship in 1926, at which juncture the BBC became a public corporation. Reith had moved to Barton Street in June 1924 with his wife Muriel, and it was from his study here that he announced the beginning of the General Strike in 1926 – a ‘very impressive performance’, he noted in his diary, with a characteristic horror of false modesty. Tired of the ‘dirt and confinement’ of London, however, the Reiths left Barton Street, the birthplace of their son Christopher, for Buckinghamshire in March 1930. On the original plaque, which was unveiled in 1994, Reith’s second forename had been omitted and as he was, in the words of his son, ‘such a stickler for absolute correctness in every detail’, it was decided to have a new plaque made with a simplified wording. It is sited on the side of the building facing Cowley Street.

Illustration   ELEANOR RATHBONE

(1872–1946) pioneer of family allowances

5 Tufton Court, Tufton Street, SW1P 3QH

THE daughter of the philanthropist and politician William Rathbone, Eleanor Rathbone became the secretary of the Liverpool Women’s Suffrage Society in 1897. In 1909 she became the first woman elected to Liverpool City Council; ten years later she succeeded Millicent Fawcett* to the presidency of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship and moved to London, where she lived at 50 Romney Street – around the corner from Tufton Street – with her lifelong friend and companion Elizabeth Macadam (1871–1948), a fellow social reformer. Rathbone was elected to Parliament for the Combined English Universities as an Independent, and held the seat from 1929 until her death. Bombed out of Romney Street in 1940, Eleanor and Elizabeth moved to 5 Tufton Court – a flat on the ground floor of a recently built seven-storey block. Since the 1920s Rathbone had campaigned for a universal benefit payable to mothers, and the Family Allowances Act of 1945 owed much to her persistence. She also pressed for a more sympathetic policy towards refugees – especially Jewish refugees. In April 1945 Eleanor and Elizabeth moved to Highgate, where Rathbone died suddenly the following year.

Illustration   SIR EDWARD GREY, VISCOUNT GREY OF FALLODON

(1862–1933) Foreign Secretary

3 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1H 9BT

‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.’

Sir Edward Grey on the eve of the First World War

BUILT in 1776, this house was the London home of Sir Edward Grey, who as Foreign Secretary from 1905 to 1916 in the Liberal governments of Henry Campbell-Bannerman* and Herbert Asquith* was largely responsible for negotiating the pre-First World War defence agreements between Britain, France and Russia. In February 1906, facing a crisis over Morocco, he suffered the tragic death of his wife Dorothy in a coaching accident. She had just secured the lease on 3 Queen Anne’s Gate, where Grey was installed by early spring. ‘I am left alone and have no wish to live,’ he told a friend; when time permitted, he found solace in birdwatching, which he and Dorothy had once enjoyed together. He was the last person to use number 3 as a private residence. Having moved away from Queen Anne’s Gate in 1913, Grey returned during the dramatic days leading up to the outbreak of war to lodge with his friend Viscount Haldane,* who wrote of him ‘sparing no effort to avoid the catastrophe’. Others were more sceptical: Ramsay MacDonald* , the Labour leader, thought that Grey ‘combined a most admirable intention with a tragic incapacity to drive his way to his own goal’. The name of Grey’s Northumberland seat, Fallodon, is unfortunately misspelt on the plaque.

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Queen Anne’s Gate contains a total of seven plaques – one of the largest concentrations in London – many of them commemorating political figures. Until 1873 it was two separate streets: Queen Square was to the west and Park Street to the east; the former intersection is now marked by a statue of Queen Anne.

Illustration   JAMES MILL

(1773–1836)

JOHN STUART MILL*

(1806–73)

philosophers

40 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1H 9AP

AFATHER-AND-SON pairing, the Mills occupied this Grade I listed early-18th-century house from 1814 to 1831. Scottish-born James Mill leased the house from Jeremy Bentham, a fellow member of the group of thinkers who became known as Philosophical Radicals. (The site of Bentham’s house, just to the south, is marked with a green Westminster City Council plaque.) Mill senior completed his ten-volume history of India while living in Queen Anne’s Gate, and – believing that schools promoted ‘vulgar modes of thought and feeling’ – set about home-educating his nine children here; but John Stuart Mill grew up, as he remembered, ‘in the absence of love’. Mistakes were punished with no lunch, and while the gruelling curriculum did eventually propel him to becoming the leading political thinker of his age, he suffered an almost catastrophic mental breakdown at the age of 20.

John Stuart Mill was tutored in Greek from the age of three, history from four, and in Latin and advanced mathematics from eight. By the age of 14 he had written a treatise on logic – in French.

Illustration   CHARLES TOWNLEY

(1737–1805) antiquary and collector

14 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1H 9AA

BORN to a Catholic landowning family in Lancashire, Townley had this house – originally 7 Park Street – built by Michael Barratt from 1775 to the designs of Samuel Wyatt, for the express purpose of displaying the collection of mostly Roman statuary that he had acquired in Italy. He moved into the house in 1778 and his treasures, which also included terracottas, bronzes, coins, gems and drawings, were put on permanent display, with servants under instruction to admit ‘all individuals of respectability who desired to see them’. Some of the 700 or so annual visitors were given guided tours by Townley himself, whose Sunday dinner guests included Joseph Nollekens,* Sir Joshua Reynolds* and Johann Zoffany.* He continued to amass antiquities right up until his death, which occurred here in 1805. Much of Townley’s collection is now on show at the British Museum.

Illustration   WILLIAM SMITH

(1756–1835) pioneer of religious liberty

16 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1H 9AA

AUNITARIAN , and a Whig MP from 1784, Smith was a leading light in securing religious dissenters their full civil rights, culminating in 1828 with the repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts, which had effectively barred Nonconformists from Crown offices. Between 1805 and 1832 he was Chairman of the Dissenting Deputies, and secured the passage of the Unitarian Toleration Act (1813). Active in the anti-slavery movement led by his friends William Wilber-force* and Thomas Clarkson, Smith was himself among the founders of the London Society for the Abolition of Slavery in Our Colonies in 1823. Having lived for many years in Clapham, Smith moved in 1794 to this house, then 6 Park Street, with his wife Frances (1758–1840) and large family; their grandchildren included Florence Nightingale* and the women’s rights campaigner Barbara Bodichon. Business reverses – including a disastrous fire at a Millbank distillery – forced the sale of the house in 1819, along with much of his library and art collection.

Illustration   LORD FISHER, OM

(1841–1920) Admiral of the Fleet, First Sea Lord

16 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1H 9AA

ASECOND plaque at number 16 commemorates Admiral Fisher, who had his official residence as First Sea Lord here, between October 1904 and January 1910; he returned to this post, though not to this address, between October 1914 and May 1915. The son of an army captain, John Arbuthnot Fisher – popularly known as Jacky – was a strong, confident personality who entered the Navy at the age of 13 and worked his way up through the ranks. As First Sea Lord he embarked on a programme of modernisation and commissioned the building of fast, heavily armed battleships; the first and most famous of these, HMS Dreadnought, was launched in 1906, while the world’s first battlecruiser, HMS Invincible, entered service the following year. Appropriately, Fisher – awarded the Order of Merit in 1905 – chose the motto ‘Fear God and Dread Nought’ on his elevation to the peerage in 1909. He had a bellicose reputation, suggesting pre-emptive strikes against the German and Japanese navies, and yet it was his routine to walk to the Admiralty in Whitehall via Westminster Abbey each day for morning prayer. It was there that he was given a public funeral.

Illustration   LORD PALMERSTON*

(1784–1865) Prime Minister

20 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1H 9AA

IT was once thought that Lord Palmerston, who was three times Foreign Secretary and twice Prime Minister, was born at Broadlands, the family estate in Hampshire. But when the LCC investigated they found a diary entry by his father Henry Temple, the 2nd Viscount Palmerston, describing a journey to London, and soon afterwards – on 20 October 1784 – a joyful report: ‘Lady P. brought to bed of a son at seven in the evening.’ They therefore placed a blue wreathed plaque on this house, formerly 4 Park Street, which forms part of a terrace built between 1775 and 1778. Palmerston’s father was its first occupant, and stayed until 1791; he was in London to sit for a portrait by Joshua Reynolds* when his second wife Mary, née Mee, went into labour. The younger Palmerston was baptised at St Margaret’s, Westminster, on 23 November 1784. A magnificent ball was thrown at Winchester to celebrate his birth; four years later, he was described as ‘quite stout, with a fine high colour’.

Illustration   LORD HALDANE

(1856–1928) statesman, lawyer and philosopher

28 Queen Anne’s Gate, SW1H 9AB

Kaiser Wilhelm II lunched with Haldane in May 1911 and chaffed him about the small size of...

‘28 Queen Anne’s Gate, which he called my Dolls’ House’.

DATING from 1704–5 and an important early survival, this house was the London home of Richard Burdon Haldane, later Viscount Haldane of Cloan, from 1907 until his death in 1928. Born and educated in Edinburgh, he served as Secretary of State for War from 1905 until 1912, during which time he founded the Imperial General Staff and the Territorial Army, and introduced the concept of a British expeditionary force. Haldane then served as Lord Chancellor until 1915, and briefly held the same office again in 1924, having switched allegiance from the Liberals to Labour. A man with a wide range of intellectual interests, Haldane helped to establish the London School of Economics in 1895, translated works by Schopenhauer* and wrote a number of his own, including The Reign of Relativity (1921). Guests at the house included Lord Kitchener,* Lord Curzon,* Albert Einstein, Edmund Gosse* and the Emperor (Kaiser) of Germany.

Illustration   WILFRID SCAWEN BLUNT

(1840–1922) diplomat, poet and traveller

15 Buckingham Gate, SW1E 6LB

THIS mid-18th-century terraced house opposite Wellington Barracks was the London home from about 1878 until 1887 of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, who married Lord Byron’s grandchild Anne King (1837–1917) – the daughter of Ada, Countess of Lovelace* – and shared Byron’s passions for verse, travel, radical politics and women. He and Anne spent much time travelling in Spain, Turkey, North Africa and the Middle East, and Blunt campaigned for causes such as Egyptian and Irish self-determination; he also published works including Sonnets and Songs by Proteus (1875) and Satan Absolved (1899). In 1872 Blunt inherited Crabbet Park in West Sussex, where – six years later – he and Anne founded a famous stud breeding Arab stallions. Blunt’s mistresses included the famous courtesan Catherine Walters (‘Skittles’) and Lady Gregory. An entry in his private diary for 1880 records his renting a flat opposite Victoria Station as a love nest; his wife eventually left him in 1906. Blunt’s dark good looks and bids for political martyrdom led one contemporary to observe, ‘The fellow knows he has a handsome head and he wants it to be seen on Temple Bar’.

At Crabbet, it was said, Blunt’s weekend guests played tennis in the nude.

Illustration   LORD HORE-BELISHA

(1893–1957) statesman

16 Stafford Place, SW1E

BORN in London, the son of a Jewish businessman, Leslie Hore-Belisha was elected Liberal MP for Plymouth Devonport in 1923, and held the seat – latterly as a National Liberal – until 1945. In 1937 Neville Chamberlain* appointed him Secretary of State for War; he piloted important army reforms, but his relations with the top brass – notably Viscount Gort* – were problematic, and he resigned in 1940; he was raised to the peerage in 1954. Hore-Belisha bought this house in the summer of 1936 and lived here – after their marriage in 1944, with his wife Cynthia – until his death. He was only the third occupant of the early-19th-century terraced house. Edwin Lutyens* remodelled the entrance hall for him and added panelling in the dining room: the politician ‘Chips’ Channon, writing in May 1938, described the décor as ‘a horror ... Wedgwood plaques cover the walls ... old ones, small ones, good ones, bad ones’.

Leslie – later Lord – Hore-Belisha is best remembered for the Belisha beacon, the flashing orange crossing indicators brought in as a road safety innovation in 1934, while he was Minister of Transport. They had a significant impact on road safety, despite initial problems with vandalism.

Illustration   CARDINAL MANNING

(1808–92) Roman Catholic prelate

22 Carlisle Place, SW1P 1JA

HENRY Edward Manning was ordained an Anglican deacon in 1832 and appointed Archdeacon of Chichester in 1840 – three years after the death of his young wife, Caroline. In 1851 he followed John Henry Newman* in converting to Roman Catholicism. As Archbishop of Westminster from 1865, Manning won regard for his social concerns, and was dubbed the ‘Cardinal of the Poor’. The building which bears this unusual lead plaque (on the Francis Street elevation) is a vast brick Italianate palazzo designed by H.A. Darbishire in about 1867, and acquired by Manning in 1872 as part of the development plans for Westminster Cathedral (built 1895–1903). It had been built as the Guardsmen’s Institute, but Manning found ‘the austerity of its bareness’ to his taste. He added a bedroom on the upper storey and worked in a large room on the first floor, surrounded by his books and papers on the floor and tables. After his death in January 1892, his body lay in state here and the crowds who queued to see him brought traffic to a halt in Victoria Street. The building, then called Archbishop House, remained the residence of the archbishops of Westminster until 1901.

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Illustration   JOSEPH CONRAD

(1857–1924) novelist

17 Gillingham Street, SW1V 1HN

‘The country is quiet just now hereabouts and the inhabitants have given up the practice of cannibalism, I believe, some time ago.’

Joseph Conrad, encouraging a friend to visit him in Gillingham Street

CONRAD rented rooms in this modest 1820s terraced house from early 1891 until his marriage in March 1896 to Jessie Emmeline George. Born in Ukraine as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, Conrad was exiled to a remote Russian province for his family’s Polish nationalist beliefs before coming to Britain in 1878 to join the British mercantile marine. Conrad’s first novel – Almayer’s Folly, begun at his previous lodgings not far away at 6 Bessborough Gardens (demolished) – was completed in his ‘snug bachelor quarters’ in Gillingham Street in 1894 and published the following year. His famous Heart of Darkness (1902) was based on his nightmarish experiences of a trip up the Congo river in 1890, which left him with a life-threatening malarial fever, for which he was treated at the German Hospital in Dalston just before his arrival at Gillingham Street.

Illustration   SIR MICHAEL COSTA

(1808–84) conductor and orchestral reformer

59 Eccleston Square, SW1V 1PH

NAPLES-BORN Michael (originally Michele) Costa came to England in 1829, and rose to become the most prominent British conductor of his generation. An early practitioner of authoritative conducting by baton (hitherto, orchestras had been led from a piano or by the first violin), he is credited with having greatly improved the standards of orchestral playing and discipline in England. Costa moved to 7 Eccleston Square in 1846, 11 years later, crossing the square to number 57, where he remained for 26 years. By this time well established as a conductor at Covent Garden and elsewhere, his later years also saw him conducting at triennial festivals at the Crystal Palace devoted to the music of Handel* (whose work he was prone to ‘improving’ by adding extra brass, timpani and even cymbals). Costa was also a composer, but his works have not stood the test of time.

Illustration   JOMO KENYATTA

(c.1894–1978) first President of the Republic of Kenya

95 Cambridge Street, SW1V 4PY

KENYATTA stayed at this address for a short spell in 1930 and then resided here again between 1933 and 1937. Born Kamau wa Ngengi in east Africa, the son of a Kikuyu farmer, he took the name Kenyatta – after the Kikuyu word for a type of beaded belt he wore – during his twenties. In 1928 he became General Secretary of the Kikuyu Central Association (KCA), a body that sought to represent the community’s grievances. This was Kenyatta’s role while he lived in Cambridge Street, when he also worked on the book Facing Mount Kenya (1938). Money was very tight; he often owed rent to his landlady, Mrs Hocken, and sold the stamps from mail he received from Kenya in order to buy penny buns. In 1934 Kenyatta supplemented his income by working as an extra on Sanders of the River, which starred Paul Robeson.* Kenyatta returned to Africa in 1946, where in 1953 he was unjustly convicted for involvement in the Mau Mau rebellion and imprisoned for almost nine years. When Kenya won self-government in 1963 he became Prime Minister, and President of the new independent Kenyan republic the following year. He died in office in 1978.

Illustration   AUBREY BEARDSLEY

(1872–98) artist

114 Cambridge Street, SW1V 4QF

‘The walls ... were distempered a violent orange, the doors and skirtings were painted black . his taste was all for the bizarre and exotic.’

The artist William Rothenstein on Beardsley’s Pimlico home

BEARDSLEY lived in this house with his sister Mabel and mother Ellen between June 1893 and June 1895. Its lease was partly bought with the proceeds of Beardsley’s precocious successes; his commissions from this time included the celebrated illustrations for Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur (1893–4) and Oscar Wilde’s Salome (1894). The two connecting rooms on the first floor in Cambridge Street were used by Beardsley as a drawing room-cum-studio, where he worked by candlelight, behind heavy curtains. Visitors to the house included Max Beerbohm,* Walter Sickert* and Oscar Wilde.* In 1894 Beardsley was employed by John Lane as art editor of The Yellow Book, but he was dismissed in the aftermath of Wilde’s downfall; the resultant loss of income prompted his departure from Cambridge Street. By the close of 1896, he was recuperating on the south coast from the consumptive attacks that claimed his life two years later, at the age of just 25.

Illustration   SWAMI VIVEKANANDA

(1863–1902)

Hindu philosopher

63 St George’s Drive

(formerly St George’s Road), SW1V 4DD

‘What will be the good of my going home? This London is the hub of the world!’

Vivekananda in June 1896. Even so, he returned to India seven months later

BORN in Calcutta as Narendranath Datta, the monk (or swami) Vivekananda became a leading spokesman for modern Hinduism and an early proponent and apologist for the faith in the West. He embarked upon his first Western Mission in 1893 and later, on his lecture tour of 1895–96, stayed at several London addresses, including – from early May until mid July 1896 – this house in St George’s Drive, part of a stucco terrace built in about 1870. The house was let to him furnished by Mortimer Reginald Margesson and his wife Lady Isabel, who was interested in the Swami’s teachings. Vivekananda held regular classes in the first-floor double drawing room, while the hub of everyday life was the street-facing ground-floor parlour, and he slept in a windowless room immediately to the rear; other parts of the house were given over to his entourage, which included Swami Saradananda who was – like Vivekananda – a disciple of the leading proponent of the Hindu revival, Sri Ramakrishna. Back in India, Vivekananda established the Ramakrishna Mission; still based in Calcutta (Kolkata), it seeks to propagate Ramakrishna’s principles and translate them into practical social action.

Illustration   DOUGLAS MACMILLAN

(1884–1969) founder of Macmillan Cancer Relief

15 Ranelagh Road, SW1V 3EX

MACMILLAN moved from Somerset to London at the turn of the 20th century, and worked as a civil servant. A Strict Baptist convert, he started a monthly periodical, The Better Quest. In the issue for August 1911, Macmillan wrote about the death of his father from cancer, and the following year founded the Society for the Prevention and Relief of Cancer. Macmillan shared the mid-19th-century stuccoed terraced house in Ranelagh Road – built by Thomas Cubitt* – with his wife Margaret; she had initially been his landlady there. They were married in 1907 and ran the society from their home virtually unassisted until their move to Sidcup in 1924. The offices of the charity – which changed its name to the National Society for Cancer Relief that year – stayed in Ranelagh Road until 1936. Since the plaque went up, the charity has changed its name to Macmillan Cancer Support, but a key priority remains the training of specialist cancer nurses.

Illustration   MAJOR WALTER CLOPTON WINGFIELD

(1833–1912) father of lawn tennis

33 St George’s Square, SW1V 2HX

WHILE Wingfield did not invent the principles of lawn tennis, it was he who patented the game in 1874 by formalising rules and standardising and marketing a tennis set that included racquets, balls, posts and a net. Wingfield called these sets ‘Sphairistike’, derived from the Greek for ball-game, a name which never caught on; the sets were sold at five guineas a throw by Messrs French & Co. at nearby 46 Churton Street. Lawn tennis – the supplementary name given to it by Wingfield as an afterthought – quickly became a popular and sociable open-air pursuit for the middle classes. By 1877 the All England Croquet Club at Wimbledon had added lawn tennis to its title, and many croquet lawns were turned into tennis courts. The game developed rapidly from Major Wingfield’s original rules, which envisaged an hour-glass-shaped court and a higher net than modern players would recognise. Later in life, Wingfield tried, less successfully, to promote group bicycle riding in time to martial music, as described in his book Bicycle Gymkhana and Musical Rides (1897). He lived for the last 10 years of his life in St George’s Square, in part of a stuccoed terrace built in about 1850 by Thomas Cubitt.*

Illustration   MILLBANK PRISON

Thames Embankment, SE1 7TL

ON the Thames Embankment side of Millbank, nearly opposite the entrance to Tate Britain, is a large cylindrical granite block with a bronze plaque commemorating Millbank Prison. It is unique among London’s official plaques in marking a fragment of a structure: the stone, which was moved from its original position, was formerly a bollard at the head of the river steps to Millbank Prison or Penitentiary.

It was from Millbank Prison, between 1843 and 1867, that prisoners sentenced to transportation to penal colonies in Australia and elsewhere embarked on their journeys. Millbank Prison, completed in 1821 by the architect Robert Smirke,* was the first national prison, and when built was the largest of its type in Europe. It was founded on the humane and rational principles of classification, employment and reason, and its design drew on the ideas of the philosopher Jeremy Bentham and the prison reformer John Howard.* After 1843 it was used as a military gaol and a general-purpose prison for both male and female convicts. It closed in November 1890, and most of the buildings had been demolished by 1893.

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ST JAMES’S

IN the 1660s Henry Jermyn, 1st Earl of St Albans, created a high-class residential area adjacent to St James’s Palace. A grand, French-style piazza – St James’s Square – was developed for ‘Noble men and other Persons of quality’ and is dominated to the north by Sir Christopher Wren’s church of St James’s, Piccadilly (1676–84). St James’s has one of the highest concentrations of listed buildings in England. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, its proximity to Court and government ensured that St James’s was home to many public figures, a fact reflected in the remarkably high number of plaques to politicians.

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Illustration   NAPOLEON III

(1808–73) Emperor of France

1C (formerly 3A) King Street, SW1Y 6QG

Napoleon seems to have left King Street in some haste in 1848; his landlord found

‘the Prince’s bed unmade and his marble bath still full of water’.

PRINCE Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte was born in Paris and, like other members of his family (he was Napoleon I’s nephew), was exiled from France after the Battle of Waterloo (1815). On his return to France in 1840, he was imprisoned for life, but six years later he managed to escape and fled to England. In February 1847 he took a lease on this house, then newly built, transformed its interior into a shrine to the Bonapartes, installing a portrait of Napoleon I by Delaroche, uniforms worn by his uncle and other relics that survived the fall of the dynasty. The prince became a leading figure in London society: he was given honorary membership of some of the most celebrated clubs in St James’s, and enrolled as a special constable during the Chartist riots of 1848. Greater disturbances across the Channel in this year of revolutions led to the overthrow of the French monarchy, and in September 1848 Louis-Napoleon departed for France, becoming president of the French Republic in December; within four years he was crowned Napoleon III. When he was exiled to England once more following the disastrous Franco-Prussian War, he moved with his wife and son to Chislehurst, Kent, where he died two years later.

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This is London’s earliest surviving blue plaque. Manufactured by Minton Hollins & Co. and put up by the Society of Arts in 1867, it is the only plaque to have been installed during the lifetime of the person commemorated, and is notable in bearing the imperial eagle, used as a symbol of empire by both Napoleon I and his nephew and heir, Napoleon III.

Illustration   ADA, COUNTESS OF LOVELACE

(1815–52) pioneer of computing

12 (formerly 10) St James’s Square, SW1Y

BORN in Piccadilly, Augusta Ada was the only legitimate child of the poet, Lord Byron. She was brought up by her mother Annabella who supervised her education and encouraged her interest in mathematics and science. In 1833, Ada met Charles Babbage, the inventor of the first general computer, a calculating machine or ‘analytical engine’: ‘I do not believe that my father was (or ever could have been) such a Poet as I shall be an Analyst; (& Metaphysician)’, she told him. At once, she began to collaborate with him and mixed in his circle of friends and acquaintances. In 1843, while she was living here, she translated a paper by an Italian, L. F. Menabrea, on Babbage’s analytical engine, and added her own extensive notes; this work, published in September of that year, has led to her being described as one of the world’s first computer programmers. Her house was built in 1836 for her husband, William, Lord King (created Earl of Lovelace in 1838), and is an early example of the Italianate style of Thomas Cubitt.*

Illustration   WILLIAM PITT, EARL OF CHATHAM

(1708–78)

EDWARD GEOFFREY STANLEY, EARL OF DERBY WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE*

(1799–1869)

(1809–98)

Prime Ministers

Chatham House, 10 (formerly 8) St James’s Square, SW1Y 4LE

THE house was built as one of three in 1735–6 to the designs of the architect Henry Flitcroft. It was owned by the Heathcote family from 1736 until 1890 and survives as a good example of a Palladian townhouse; the principal feature of its interior, and one which would still be recognised by its three most famous residents, is its fine full-height staircase. Pitt the Elder – created an earl in 1766 – occupied the house from 1759 until late 1761, when at the apogee of his power and glory, nominally as Secretary of State for the Southern Department but in effect leading the government. During this time, Pitt presided over a series of military victories that effectively marked the creation of the British Empire and ensured Britain’s success in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). He left St James’s Square at about the time of his resignation as Secretary of State in October 1761, and went on to serve as Prime Minister between 1766 and 1768.

Lord Derby, three times Prime Minister, was in opposition when he took up residence here in late 1837. While living here, in 1852, he had his first, fleeting, taste of the top job; in about 1854 he moved to 23 (now 33) St James’s Square, which remained his town house until the time of his death. Gladstone lived here during the parliamentary session of 1890, while leader of the opposition; he went on to serve his fourth, and last, term as Prime Minister in 1892–4.

Illustration   NANCY ASTOR

(1879–1964) the first woman to sit in Parliament

4 St James’s Square, SW1Y

VIRGINIA-BORN Nancy Witcher Langhorne came to England in 1904 and two years later married fellow American Waldorf Astor, the politician and newspaper proprietor. In 1912 they acquired this house, built in 1726–8 for the 1st Duke of Kent and the oldest to survive on the square (it is now the Naval and Military Club). Its magnificent reception rooms provided a glittering setting for entertainment: the house’s first-floor ballroom could hold as many as 1,000 people. Nancy, according to her Oxford DNB entry, ‘liked to pose at the top of the staircase, sparkling with jewels, to welcome her guests’. Originally promoted as a stopgap candidate for her husband’s seat when he succeeded to a peerage, she was Conservative member for Plymouth Sutton for over 25 years (1919–45); her most notable achievement was in banning the sale of alcohol to minors. The house, bomb-damaged and requisitioned during the Second World War, was sold in 1946.

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Illustration   SIR ISAAC NEWTON

(1642–1727) natural philosopher and mathematician

87 Jermyn Street, SW1Y 6JP

NEWTON moved to London – and to Jermyn Street – in 1696, on his appointment as Master of the Mint. He lived at number 88 until 1700, before moving next door to a larger house which stood on this site until the early years of the 20th century; here he remained until autumn 1709. During this time Newton held a series of important appointments: he was Lucasian Professor at Cambridge until 1702 and President of the Royal Society, 1703–27. His knighthood arrived in 1705. In 1704 he published Opticks, drawing upon earlier research, and in 1713 came the second edition of Principia, in which Newton set out his three laws of motion and his law of universal gravitation.

Illustration   WILLIAM EWART GLADSTONE*

(1809–98) statesman

11 Carlton House Terrace, SW1Y 5AJ

‘You cannot fight against the future. Time is on our side.’

Gladstone in April 1866, to opponents of plans to extend voting rights to working men

LIVERPOOL-BORN , Gladstone moved to London in 1833, on taking his seat in the Commons, and moved to Carlton House Terrace in April 1856. He began his second stint as Chancellor of the Exchequer in 1859, was Leader of the House of Commons in 1865–6 and became Prime Minister in 1868. Defeated over proposals for Irish Home Rule in 1874, Gladstone resigned as Liberal Party leader the following year and left Carlton House Terrace, London, for Hawarden Castle in north Wales, though he was to return three times as Prime Minister, before finally retiring in 1894. Gladstone preferred living in this John Nash* terrace of 1827–32 to any of his official residences:

‘I had grown to the house, having lived more time in it than in any other since I was born, and mainly by reason of all that was done in it,’ he said. He occasionally used it for Cabinet business and entertained here extensively: his breakfast parties were celebrated, and in 1865 he gave a ball for the Prince of Wales. Gladstone installed a ‘modest’ picture gallery here, and displayed his considerable collection of Wedgwood and other china.

Illustration   GEORGE NATHANIEL CURZON, MARQUESS CURZON OF KEDLESTON

(1859–1925) statesman and Viceroy of India

1 Carlton House Terrace, SW1Y 5AF

AN MP from the age of 27, Curzon acquired this house in 1898, shortly before he left England to take up the post of Viceroy of India. He settled permanently here, soon after his return, in March 1906; sadly, his ailing wife Mary – to whom he was devoted – died here that July. Out of office until 1915, Curzon devoted himself to his interest in the arts and conservation: he restored Bodiam Castle, East Sussex, and Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire, both of which he bequeathed to the nation, and drafted reports that shaped the future of the National Gallery and the Tate Gallery. In May 1914 the coming-out ball of Irene, one of his three daughters, was held in the house; a supper room 70 feet (21m) long was erected in the garden, and the Robert Adam* silver was brought from Kedleston, Derbyshire, Curzon’s ancestral home. He returned to office in 1915 in the coalition Cabinet, and four years later became Foreign Secretary under Lloyd George.* He remained at the Foreign Office until 1924, and died at his home here the following year.

Illustration   LORD PALMERSTON*

(1784–1865) statesman

4 Carlton Gardens, SW1Y 5AA

HENRY John Temple, 3rd Viscount Palmerston, was one of the most colourful and commanding of Victorian politicians. He lived from late 1846 until January 1855 at a house on this site. An MP from 1807, Palmerston sat in 16 : parliaments, at first as a Tory, later as a Liberal. He became Foreign Secretary – for the third time – in the year he moved here. Palmerston’s maverick approach to the ; niceties of diplomacy often brought : him into conflict with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, and the Court seized the pretext of his unofficial recognition of Napoleon III* to secure his dismissal from office in 1851, though he was subsequently appointed Home Secretary (18525). In 1855 he began the first of two spells as Prime Minister, and left for 94 Piccadilly. When the plaque was erected in 1907, the house was the residence of the former Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, who had acquired the property in 1870. The site is now occupied by an office block of 1933–4 by Sir Reginald Blomfield & Son.

Illustration   GENERAL CHARLES DE GAULLE

(1890–1970) President of the French National Committee

4 Carlton Gardens, SW1Y 5AA

DE Gaulle set up the headquarters of the Free French Forces here in late July 1940; he had a private office next door, at number 3. On 18 June 1940, the day after his arrival in London, de Gaulle had used the BBC radio service – with the support of Winston Churchill* – to deliver his famous address, encouraging his countrymen to continue to fight the occupation; the broadcast was concluded with the words, ‘Whatever happens the flame of French resistance must not and shall not be extinguished.’ Sentenced to death in absentia, de Gaulle set about organising the Free French Forces, which by the end of 1944 numbered one million individuals. Following liberation, he led the French Provisional Government, and in 1958 beccame the first president of the French fifth republic, a post he held until 1969.

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De Gaulle in his office at Carlton Terrace, 1943.

Illustration   FIELD-MARSHAL EARL KITCHENER OF KHARTOUM, KG

(1850–1916) senior army officer

2 Carlton Gardens, SW1Y 5AA

HORATIO Herbert Kitchener was born in Ireland to English parents, and spent his military career abroad, coming to public attention as Commander-in-Chief (Sirdar) of the Egyptian Army (1892–9) in which capacity he saw victory at the Battle of Omdurman (1898), avenging the death of General Gordon at Khartoum and earning himself a barony – the earldom followed in 1914. He was lent this splendid semi-detached house, with views over the Mall and St James’s Park and complete with domestic staff, by his friend Harriet, Lady Wantage, and he lived here, with his personal secretaries Captain Oswald Fitzgerald and (Sir) George Arthur, towards the end of his long and distinguished career, from August 1914 until February 1915. On the outbreak of war in 1914, he had been appointed Secretary of State for War, and while living here advised the Cabinet on military strategy and prepared plans for the expansion of the British Army. This laid the foundations for the victory he did not live to see: Kitchener drowned when the ship carrying him on a special mission to Russia struck a German mine in June 1916.

Illustration   THOMAS GAINSBOROUGH

(1727–88) artist

Schomberg House, 80–82 Pall Mall, SW1Y 5ES

REBUILT for the 3rd Duke of Schomberg in 1698, the building was subdivided into three properties in 1769; Gainsborough occupied the westernmost portion. Born in Suffolk, he received the patronage of George III in 1774 and immediately became the most fashionable portrait painter of the age. At his home here, he built a large painting room over the garden, above which was a salon used as another studio and also for the display of paintings; here, the artist produced works such as the portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Cumberland (1777) and Mrs R. B. Sheridan (1785), and his series of ‘fancy pictures’, the name given to his genre pieces such as The Cottage Girl (1785). After Gainsborough’s disagreement and then break with the Royal Academy – headed by his great rival, Sir Joshua Reynolds* – in 1783, the display of pictures at Schomberg House assumed greater importance, and patrons and critics were regularly admitted to his galleries. He held his first private exhibition here in 1784.

Illustration   FREDERIC CHOPIN

(1810–49) composer

4 St James’s Place, SW1A 1NP

BORN near Warsaw to a French father and Polish mother, Chopin was a child prodigy. In 1848, in flight from revolutionary Paris, he travelled to England with his Scottish pupil, Jane Stirling. He first took lodgings in Mayfair and then in October, following a trip to Scotland, and already seriously ill, he settled in this house, which dates from the development of 1685–6, was originally part of a brown-brick terrace but was stuccoed in the early 19th century and refaced in the 1970s. It was from here, as the plaque records, that Chopin travelled to the Guildhall to give what turned out to be his final performance.

Illustration   WILLIAM HUSKISSON

(1770–1830) statesman

28 St James’s Place, SW1A 1NR

HUSKISSON moved to this late-17th-century house, which was rebuilt by Henry Holland in 1794, in 1804, the year he became MP for Liskeard and was appointed a Secretary to the Treasury; he went on to be variously President of the Board of Trade, Colonial Secretary and Leader of the House of Commons, and was tipped as a potential Prime Minister in succession to his ally, George Canning.* Sadly, Huskisson’s political successes as a promoter of free trade tend to be overshadowed by the circumstances of his death. Always accident-prone, he was Britain’s first railway casualty, killed by a train at the ceremonial opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway on 15 September 1830.

Illustration   HENRY PELHAM

(1694–1754), Prime Minister

Wimborne House, 22 Arlington Street, SW1A

THE house, of considerable significance as a survival of William Kent’s work in London, was begun in 1740, but was only finished shortly before Pelham’s death here in March 1754; its interiors are among the most magnificent in St James’s, and were used as a setting for Pelham’s many levees (meaning receptions). The first part of the house was sufficiently complete for Pelham and his wife, Lady Katherine, to take up residence in May 1743; shortly afterwards, Pelham’s near neighbour, Horace Walpole* commented that Arlington Street had become ‘absolutely the ministerial street’. Shortly after moving in, Pelham – a Whig, and a protegé of Sir Robert Walpole* – became First Lord of the Treasury, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the House of Commons; he died in office, and was succeeded as Prime Minister by his elder brother, Thomas, Duke of Newcastle. The house, a testament to Pelham’s architectural passion, was altered in the 20th century. The plaque is to the rear, facing Green Park.

Illustration   SIR ROBERT WALPOLE, EARL OF ORFORD

(1676–1745) Prime Minister

HORACE WALPOLE

(1717–97) connoisseur and man of letters

5 Arlington Street, SW1A 1RA

REGARDED as the first British statesman to hold the office with which the title of Prime Minister is now associated, Walpole left 10 Downing Street, which had been granted to him by George II after his fall from power in 1742, and moved back to Arlington Street, keeping his London house here until his death. Earlier in his career, between 1715 and 1732, Sir Robert had lived at 17 Arlington Street (demolished in the 1930s to make way for Arlington House); it was there that his son Horace was born, the youngest of Walpole’s children with his wife Catherine.

Renowned as an author, aesthete and wit, Horace is remembered especially for the creation of the ‘little Gothic castle’ of Strawberry Hill, Twickenham (1749–66), a striking contrast to the magnificence of Houghton Hall, Norfolk, that had been built by his father in 1721–35. Horace filled Arlington Street with part of his collection. Paintings and antiquities jostled for space with his ‘curious cabinets of limnings, enamels, and his collection of English heads &c’, together with ‘a number of antique coins, medals, medallions, etc’. Such wonders made the house a meeting place for London’s dilettanti, but also attracted unwelcome visitors: in 1771 it was rifled by burglars. While living here, Walpole published his Gothic romance The Castle of Otranto (1764). A lifelong bachelor, he lived in Arlington St. until 1779, when he moved to 11 Berkeley Square, Mayfair (demolished).

Although both Walpoles are commemorated at number 5 it is now known that only Horace lived here, while his father lived in a larger house at number 4, a late-17th-century building partly refronted in 1786–7. After his father’s death in 1745, Horace moved next door to number 4, the more spacious of the two houses. The house bearing the plaque was later rebuilt, in 1795–7.

COVENT GARDEN AND THE STRAND

THE Strand – on the north bank of the River Thames – forms a significant part of the route between the cities of London and