When it comes to blue plaques, or any kind of metallic heritage-based commemoration, London wins hands down.
By dint of being the capital city for a millennium, not to mention the largest city in the country by a considerable margin, anyone who's anyone has lived here, worked here or at least dropped by to do something important at some point in their life.
Other towns and cities sometimes struggle in comparison, their plaques often making do with the fact that Queen Victoria visited, Charles Dickens once stayed, some famous person was born here but left to seek their fortune, or resorting instead to local dignitaries like the merchant who became an MP, the mayor who rebuilt the bank or the woman who wrote a nice poem.
Melton Mowbray, for example, peaks here.
English Heritage run the longstanding blue plaque scheme in the capital, whereas outside London commemoration is mostly up to councils, civic societies and other organisations. But the number of blue plaques in the capital still hasn't quite reached a total of 1000, despite the fact they could appear on tens of thousands of frontages if the acceptance criteria were slightly more lax.
So I wondered which London building would have the most blue plaques if they were dished out willy-nilly to everyone who passed a basic importance threshold. What should be London's blue plaquiest building?
19 houses currently have two blue plaques commemorating different people. Some are unsurprising couplings, given the context, such as 20 Maresfield Gardens (Sigmund Freud and Anna Freud) and 29 Fitzroy Square (George Bernard Shaw and Virginia Woolf). Others are more coincidental, such as 4 Carlton Gardens (Lord Palmerston and Charles de Gaulle), 58 Grafton Way (Francisco de Miranda and Andres Bello) and most recently 48 Paultons Square (Samuel Beckett and Patrick Blackett). No building has three blue plaques.
But we can do better than that. The Tesco Express on Southgate Road in Hackney was once the site of the 5th Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which was attended by Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. That's three. George Lansbury, leader of the Labour Party, once lived on Bow Road and would have been visited there by his granddaughter Angela Lansbury, his grandson Oliver Postgate and the suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. That's four. And the Spice Girls filmed their video for Wannabe at the Midland Grand Hotel, St Pancras, and OK officially you have to be dead to get a blue plaque but let's call that five.
Yes, I'm toying with you. Other London properties, due to their long-term importance, have been home to dozens of people you'll find in the history books, maybe even hundreds. Think of all the people who've lived, stayed or been incarcerated in the Tower of London, for example, not to mention those who lost their heads there. The gatehouse could easily sport blue plaques for William the Conqueror, Edward I and Henry VIII, and less happily Edward V, Anne Boleyn and the Kray Brothers. In the City the Mansion House could be emblazoned with plaques for oodles of Mayors of London, even if you restricted it to the important ones. And just think of all the famous people who've stepped into Broadcasting House over the years, not just much-loved presenters but all the VIPs who've sat down for an interview. Plaque overload would be possible at all of these.
There is a strong case that the London house with the most famous succession of occupants is 10 Downing Street. Ever since Robert Walpole knocked it about it's been the place where decisions of enormous consequence have taken place and, especially since the start of the 20th century, home to the Prime Minister of the day as well. When it comes to plaques saying "X lived here" as opposed to just worked or passed through, 10 Downing Street might be the most formidable contender of all. A fair few plaques could go up outside number 11 too, should you want to imagine the plague of plaques this might engender.
Or perhaps it's Buckingham Palace, which since 1837 has been the principal London residence of the monarch. We've only had seven monarchs since then, so not an enormous total, but once you start adding in the other famous members of the family that total swiftly swells. Thousands more have visited, including multiple world leaders, and if you throw in all the knighthoods bestowed you could easily cover a whole wall with plaques.
But I'm going to assert that London's blue plaquiest building, potentially at least, is Westminster Abbey.
Every monarch since 1066 has been crowned here (bar the also-rans of Edward V, Lady Jane Grey and Edward VIII). Every member of the Royal family over the last nine centuries will have been here at some point, there always being some ceremony, wedding or funeral to draw them in. Then there's all the politicians who've been inside, including all the greats (and loads of the not-so-greats too), plus civic leaders, religious figureheads, military bigwigs, showbiz personalities and international guests. Just the congregation from the recent coronation of King Charles could fill a wall... not that I'm recommending plaquing over Hawksmoor's frontage with cumulative congregations over the years, but the West steps of the Abbey may have the densest concentration of famous footsteps anywhere in London, perhaps even anywhere in the world.
And you may say "Ant and Dec sat here" is no reason for a blue plaque, but in some parts of the provinces "Ant and Dec sat here" is about as exciting as it gets.
