I love walking around cities when I travel. Sure, it takes a little more effort, sometimes tires you out and it's not necessarily the fastest way to get from point A to point B, but moving around on foot allows you to get a great sense of where you are and what the place you are visiting is like. Taxis are quick and convenient and public transportation like buses and subways are cheap and available, but walking gets you closer to the fabric of where you are visiting better than any other mode of transportation. At least that's my take anyway. I always try to walk at least a little bit wherever I go no matter how little time I am spending wherever I happen to be.
In the last four years or so, I've spent a good amount of time walking around the city of London. It's definitely become one of my favorite cities in the world since I started writing this blog and my feet have taken me to a whole series of pubs, museums, parks, famous buildings, statues and maybe the odd ferris wheel or cathedral or two. Hoofing it while I'm in town in my various pairs of Rockports has allowed me to get a good feel of how the city first started and how it developed.
Walk long enough in London (and believe me, you can walk a long time in London) and you are bound to eventually notice one of over 900 circular blue signs scattered about the city on what seem to be random buildings. You may find just one on a street or there may be two or three on adjacent buildings on a city block. Get close enough to these things to read the words on them and you'll typically find that the signs commemorate a spot where someone more notable than I will ever be lived, stayed, visited, ate or died. You've just found one of London's famous Blue Plaques.
The first Blue Plaque was installed in 1867 on a house in Holles Street allegedly lived in by the poet Lord Byron. It is now gone along with the house it was attached to. Since that first plaque was installed (and it likely wasn't blue in color) by the Society of Arts, there have been markers installed all over the city to commemorate the fact that someone who did something notable did something on that spot or in the building attached to the Plaque. You likely have never heard of some of these folks like Luke Howard (he invented names for the clouds) or Frances Bush (lace manufacturer) or Alexander Parkes (metallurgist) but look long enough and you are bound to find Charles Dickens or Mahatma Gandhi or John F. Kennedy or maybe even someone who has deep personal meaning for you. Just don't look for anyone still alive (or recently deceased); you need to be gone 20 years to get one of these.
Despite the name used today, the first Plaques were not blue in color but a reddish-brown hue. The current blue design was rolled out in 1938 and has been used ever since. Over the years, the group responsible for the plaques has changed hands; today the English Heritage is the custodian of all of these in London. And yes, there are some elsewhere in the country but those are separate efforts unrelated to the London ones.
In my previous trips to London, I'd never really paid much attention to the Blue Plaques. This year I decided it might be interesting to seek out a few related to people who meant something to me. Who knows, I might feel something spiritual or find myself somewhere interesting that I'd never been before. I made a list of 30 or 40 then pared it down to about a dozen and ended up seeing just eight. And I didn't actually see one of the eight for reasons which will become obvious below. I'm listing them in reverse order of the birthdate of whom I went to spot.
Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970)
Every so often in the history of my appreciation of music, I've come across a song or piece of music that had me totally transfixed the first time I heard it. Pink Floyd's "Brain Damage/Eclipse" and Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" come to mind here. A number of these experiences happened in the late 1980s when I was driving to some summer job in Connecticut in my parents' 1979 Buick Century station wagon. Such was the case with "Hey Joe". I was amazed at how powerful such a simple song like that could be. I had no idea who it was only that it was simply amazing. It was one of those "what the hell was that?" moments. Of course, it was Jimi Hendrix.
I'm not a big Jimi Hendrix fan in the sense that some people are Hendrix fans. By that I mean while I have all three Hendrix studio albums in addition to the compilation of blues songs put out during the unearthing of his catalog probably 20 or so years ago, I'm not super fanatical about Hendrix and ready to label him as the be all and end all of guitar players. I'd rather listen to Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan or Mark Knopfler. That's Stevie Ray doing Stevie Ray, not Stevie Ray doing Hendrix. But because of "Hey Joe" and Jimi's importance to the history of music in general, we made our way to 23 Brook Street in Mayfair to the white townhouse shown above.
Hendrix only lived here for one year and it wasn't actually Jimi's place; it was his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham's apartment. By the time he was in residence on Brook Street he had already recorded and released Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland and would headline Woodstock later in 1969. Before the end of 1970 and also in London, Hendrix was dead. I can imagine this neighborhood hasn't much changed since Jimi lived here. I can envision him emerging from the red door at whatever time it would be in the afternoon after long hours doing whatever the night before. I bet he looked wild in 1969 London.
Interestingly, about 200 years before Hendrix lived on Brook Street, the composer George Frideric Handel lived right next door to number 23. I'd like to believe Handel and Hendrix might have had something in common. Maybe.
John Lennon (1940-1980)
There is a gap in my music memory from about the fall of 1986 to maybe just after the middle of 1990. During those years I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and instead of being in synch with current music, I was going backwards. I started with the Moody Blues; moved on to Pink Floyd; explored all sort prog including Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer; dabbled in Bob Dylan (the full Dylan exploration would come in grad school) and Neil Young (thanks, Scott Richey); and spent a lot of time listening to late 1960's music from The Beatles. I firmly believe The Beatles redefined all of popular music; they moved the art forward decades in a few short years.
If you are heading on a Beatles pilgrimage to England, you have to hit Liverpool (where they started out) and London (where they all eventually moved to because they were recording at Abbey Road Studios). There is just one Beatles-related Blue Plaque in London and it's on Montagu Square, a long strip of a park just south of the Baker Street Underground stop. The plaque marks the spot where John Lennon lived in 1968.
1968 would be the year the group recorded and released The Beatles, better known as The White Album. It was probably the least collaborative album the group ever made. It was pretty much a collection of tracks recorded by each of the four members as solo tracks and just smushed together as a Beatles album. The year after Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, things were starting to come apart. In my opinion, this was not John's finest work. I'll give "Revolution 1", "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" and particularly "Sexy Sadie" high marks but I can leave the rest of Lennon's output on The White Album. I'm sure there are few out there who disagree with me here.
Lennon lived in the basement and first floor of 34 Montagu Square (which is the second unit in from the end in the photograph above) for just five months with Yoko Ono. Oddly enough, Jimi Hendrix also lived in the same unit before John did.
Charles Rolls (1877-1910)
Charles Rolls, along with Henry Royce, founded Rolls-Royce, Ltd. in the first decade of the twentieth century. You might know his firm as a luxury automobile manufacturer and probably the most famous English car maker in history. If you know a little more about the firm, you'll know that they were an early pioneer in the aviation industry and their successor firm still manufactures aero engines to this day.
I know little to nothing about how engines or any other sort of machinery works. I'm hopeless with that sort of stuff. But my dad isn't and he put his design talents to work at Rolls-Royce designing fan blades in jet engines for the better part of 20 years or so. We went to find this Blue Plaque on Conduit Street, which commemorates the spot of Rolls' office from 1905 to 1910, for my dad. My dad never knew Rolls; he was born 27 years after Rolls died in a flying tournament at Bournemouth on the south coast of England. But we went there just the same because of where my dad used to work.
I didn't know this at the time but Rolls was the sales guy and Royce was the engineer. While Rolls was a machine enthusiast (he broke the land speed record in an automobile several times and was the first man to pilot a plane solo non-stop across the English Channel and back) he apparently had nothing to do with the design of the product that made his company world famous. My dad, of course, did know this. His reaction when I told him we visited this spot was pretty much "Rolls was just the sales guy." No engineer, no respect from my dad. Oh well. At least I learned something.
Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904)
I had no idea but Henry Morton Stanley had a hell of a rough start to life. And I mean that in about every sense of the word. He was born of uncertain parentage in Wales and was given the name John Rowlands, his last name being his presumed father who was not married to his mother and who passed away shortly after young John was born. He bounced around between relatives for five or so years before being deposited at the St. Asaph Union Workhouse for the Poor, where he was certainly abused and victimized by older boys and (according to some accounts) the headmaster.
He took the name Henry Morton Stanley after fleeing Britain for America when he was 18 years of age. While there seems to be some doubt to the story, Stanley claimed he was adopted by a man named Henry Hope Stanley after whom he renamed himself. After fighting for the Confederacy at Shiloh during the American Civil War, Stanley became a journalist, chronicling events in the American west and later in the Ottoman Empire and northern Africa.
Stanley is perhaps less well known by his name than by his most famous quote: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Stanley was recruited by the New York Herald to find the explorer, missionary and abolitionist David Livingstone, who had become lost to the western world and who we ran into (in statue form) at Victoria Falls near Livingstone, Zambia. Without knowing anything about Stanley's early life, this is the reason why I sought out his Blue Plaque in London. Anyone generally connected with Livingstone in a positive context is likely OK in my book.
Stanley's Plaque is barely visible in the left side of the photograph above at 2 Richmond Terrace. And yes, that was about as close as we could get. The building is now part of the New Scotland Yard; the two semi-automatic toting policemen we passed about five minutes before I took the picture made me not really want to spend too much time getting the best shot I could. Stanley's Plaque reads "Sir Henry Morton Stanley, 1841-1904, Explorer and Writer lived and died here".
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Sitting on the shelf of my library at home are four cloth-bound hardcover books I bought a long, long time ago when the idea of having a library of classics was a fleeting thought in my head. I got as far as four: Lord Jim and Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Conrad is one of my all time writer idols and I love Steinbeck (Sweet Tuesday is my personal favorite) but Moby Dick has to be one of the greatest stories of obsession, (attempted) revenge and destruction ever written. It's simply awesome.
Melville lived at the end row house shown above on Craven Street near the Thames for just a few weeks two years before Moby Dick was published. Oddly enough, I felt more emotion on this spot than all the other Blue Plaques we visited. I just thought about how cool it would be to live in this townhouse today knowing that Melville, right before he churned out one of the all-time greatest novels in history, was hanging out there for a little while in the mid 1800s. In a totally sideways thought, if nothing else how much more does it make the end unit here worth. I can't imagine owning this place and sitting in the living room thinking about where Melville might have sat. I'm in awe.
Moby Dick, by the way, flopped when it was first published. Melville never recovered from its failure and became a New York Customs inspector. The irony. There will be more later in this post.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
I have no picture of the plaque celebrating Samuel Taylor Coleridge's time in a building that no longer stands. Not because the Plaque got taken away with the Coleridge's former residence but because the current spot where it is mounted was buried behind the scaffolding surrounding the current building shown above. We just couldn't find it. It was the only one that we looked for that we didn't see.
I hate poetry. Absolutely loathe it. But Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is an exception. I love love love this epic poem of damnation and continual attempted redemption as much for the dark and sinister subject as for the way it is written and reads. It's honestly the only poem I've ever been easily able to understand. For this, Coleridge seems worthy of some honor from me.
Coleridge, along with William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement of English poetry. He was also a lifelong opium addict stemming from his being treated with laudanum as a child for various illnesses. His life was pretty much as I would imagine a successful poet's life: spending time in idyllic landscapes writing verse and traveling while holding administrative posts appropriate to someone of his class. I can completely see Coleridge hanging around in London with Wordsworth or other contemporaries while discussing politics or poetry. The Plaque we didn't see at 71 Berners Street when we were in town is one of two celebrating Coleridge; the other is at 7 Addison Bridge Place.
This is not the first time The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has appeared in this blog. Two years ago, we visited the grave of Gustave Doré in Paris; Doré was an illustrator whose works brought the mariner's tale to life and complement the creepy tale by Coleridge perfectly.
William Wilberforce (1759-1833)
The reason why I've listed the folks whose Blue Plaques I visited this year in reverse order of their birth date is because I wanted to save William Wilberforce until last. I'm assuming most people reading this blog know who Lennon and/or Hendrix were and stand a good chance of recognizing the name of Herman Melville or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Maybe you can put Rolls with Rolls-Royce and know Stanley if you ever studied explorers. But Wilberforce? He's probably the most obscure of the bunch.
William Wilberforce was a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons representing Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire. He secured his seat in the House by buying votes, a practice apparently customary back about 250 years ago. There were a lot of MPs back in the 1700s and a lot have been forgotten; Wilberforce is still known today because of his leading role in the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire.
The Slave Trade Act of 1807 was passed after a 20 year campaign by Wilberforce and others. The Act, I am sure, did not do everything Wilberforce and his backers hoped it would do. It did not make slavery illegal (just trading in slaves) in Britain or elsewhere in the Empire. But it did start the practice of the Royal Navy punishing (albeit sometimes just through fines) those trading in slaves and did allow Britain to start to pressure other nations to follow suit. It was not an overnight international success story. David Livingstone (yes, the same guy found by Henry Morton Stanley) was still battling the slave trade in East Africa some fifty years later. But Wilberforce's efforts ultimately led to Britain pushing for and securing control of Zanzibar in 1890 with the express purpose of ending the slave trade off the east coast of Africa. Wilberforce moved the ball forward a lot, even if it didn't bring down the entire slave trade worldwide immediately.
This is not the first time we've sought out William Wilberforce in London. We were searching for his tomb in Westminster Abbey two years ago and had to ask for directions. We were led to his memorial by a lady who commented that nobody ever asks to find Wilberforce. On this trip we visited both the Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common (shown above) where WIlberforce used to worship, along with the spot where he used to live in the Clapham neighborhood just to the west of the Church. Both were worth stopping at to understand his likely walk from home to services on Sunday mornings, although I guess there's some doubt as to the exact location of his house. The current Plaque (shown below) is mounted to a residence of more recent vintage. It's old enough to not be blue.
If you are interested in understanding a little more about Wilberforce, pick up a copy of the movie Amazing Grace. While I'm sure it condenses his 20 year effort to pass the Slave Trade Act and takes a good bit of artistic license, it's worth watching.
We visited these places so we could understand a little bit more about where some historical figures that I admire lived, worked, played and died. That alone was worth it. There are dozens more that could fill future trips but I'm not sure we are going to concentrate on seeking a whole series out on any one vacation after this one.
There was a side benefit in seeking out our eight Blue Plaques and it's the same benefit I often get by walking around cities: finding these landmarks got us walking through some parts of London we never would have been to otherwise. It got us close to 10 Downing Street (the Prime Minister's residence) which I'd never seen before in addition to having a pint or two of Fuller's London Pride at The Bank near Wilberforce's old neighborhood.
But the best thing we came across was a statue of William Tyndale in Whitehall Gardens on our way from Melville to Stanley. Tyndale was the first translator of the Old Testament into English (from Greek). If you had asked me to guess when this translation was first made, I would have taken a stab at somewhere around the turn of the second millennium A.D. and I would have been way wrong. Tyndale died in 1536 possibly while he was still working on the translation. That means that nobody in England had access to the Bible in English before the mid-1500s and honestly not many would have access right after that date either. I'm amazed. Sometimes walking gets you to some unexpected surprises. Ironically, Tyndale was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation before his body was burned at the stake (I mean, what's the point?). I'll end with that cheery, but also completely medieval, thought.
Every so often in the history of my appreciation of music, I've come across a song or piece of music that had me totally transfixed the first time I heard it. Pink Floyd's "Brain Damage/Eclipse" and Elton John's "Funeral for a Friend/Love Lies Bleeding" come to mind here. A number of these experiences happened in the late 1980s when I was driving to some summer job in Connecticut in my parents' 1979 Buick Century station wagon. Such was the case with "Hey Joe". I was amazed at how powerful such a simple song like that could be. I had no idea who it was only that it was simply amazing. It was one of those "what the hell was that?" moments. Of course, it was Jimi Hendrix.
I'm not a big Jimi Hendrix fan in the sense that some people are Hendrix fans. By that I mean while I have all three Hendrix studio albums in addition to the compilation of blues songs put out during the unearthing of his catalog probably 20 or so years ago, I'm not super fanatical about Hendrix and ready to label him as the be all and end all of guitar players. I'd rather listen to Clapton or Stevie Ray Vaughan or Mark Knopfler. That's Stevie Ray doing Stevie Ray, not Stevie Ray doing Hendrix. But because of "Hey Joe" and Jimi's importance to the history of music in general, we made our way to 23 Brook Street in Mayfair to the white townhouse shown above.
Hendrix only lived here for one year and it wasn't actually Jimi's place; it was his girlfriend Kathy Etchingham's apartment. By the time he was in residence on Brook Street he had already recorded and released Are You Experienced, Axis: Bold As Love and Electric Ladyland and would headline Woodstock later in 1969. Before the end of 1970 and also in London, Hendrix was dead. I can imagine this neighborhood hasn't much changed since Jimi lived here. I can envision him emerging from the red door at whatever time it would be in the afternoon after long hours doing whatever the night before. I bet he looked wild in 1969 London.
Interestingly, about 200 years before Hendrix lived on Brook Street, the composer George Frideric Handel lived right next door to number 23. I'd like to believe Handel and Hendrix might have had something in common. Maybe.
John Lennon (1940-1980)
There is a gap in my music memory from about the fall of 1986 to maybe just after the middle of 1990. During those years I was an undergraduate at the University of Michigan and instead of being in synch with current music, I was going backwards. I started with the Moody Blues; moved on to Pink Floyd; explored all sort prog including Yes and Emerson, Lake and Palmer; dabbled in Bob Dylan (the full Dylan exploration would come in grad school) and Neil Young (thanks, Scott Richey); and spent a lot of time listening to late 1960's music from The Beatles. I firmly believe The Beatles redefined all of popular music; they moved the art forward decades in a few short years.
If you are heading on a Beatles pilgrimage to England, you have to hit Liverpool (where they started out) and London (where they all eventually moved to because they were recording at Abbey Road Studios). There is just one Beatles-related Blue Plaque in London and it's on Montagu Square, a long strip of a park just south of the Baker Street Underground stop. The plaque marks the spot where John Lennon lived in 1968.
1968 would be the year the group recorded and released The Beatles, better known as The White Album. It was probably the least collaborative album the group ever made. It was pretty much a collection of tracks recorded by each of the four members as solo tracks and just smushed together as a Beatles album. The year after Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, things were starting to come apart. In my opinion, this was not John's finest work. I'll give "Revolution 1", "Happiness Is A Warm Gun" and particularly "Sexy Sadie" high marks but I can leave the rest of Lennon's output on The White Album. I'm sure there are few out there who disagree with me here.
Lennon lived in the basement and first floor of 34 Montagu Square (which is the second unit in from the end in the photograph above) for just five months with Yoko Ono. Oddly enough, Jimi Hendrix also lived in the same unit before John did.
Charles Rolls (1877-1910)
Charles Rolls, along with Henry Royce, founded Rolls-Royce, Ltd. in the first decade of the twentieth century. You might know his firm as a luxury automobile manufacturer and probably the most famous English car maker in history. If you know a little more about the firm, you'll know that they were an early pioneer in the aviation industry and their successor firm still manufactures aero engines to this day.
I didn't know this at the time but Rolls was the sales guy and Royce was the engineer. While Rolls was a machine enthusiast (he broke the land speed record in an automobile several times and was the first man to pilot a plane solo non-stop across the English Channel and back) he apparently had nothing to do with the design of the product that made his company world famous. My dad, of course, did know this. His reaction when I told him we visited this spot was pretty much "Rolls was just the sales guy." No engineer, no respect from my dad. Oh well. At least I learned something.
Henry Morton Stanley (1841-1904)
I had no idea but Henry Morton Stanley had a hell of a rough start to life. And I mean that in about every sense of the word. He was born of uncertain parentage in Wales and was given the name John Rowlands, his last name being his presumed father who was not married to his mother and who passed away shortly after young John was born. He bounced around between relatives for five or so years before being deposited at the St. Asaph Union Workhouse for the Poor, where he was certainly abused and victimized by older boys and (according to some accounts) the headmaster.
He took the name Henry Morton Stanley after fleeing Britain for America when he was 18 years of age. While there seems to be some doubt to the story, Stanley claimed he was adopted by a man named Henry Hope Stanley after whom he renamed himself. After fighting for the Confederacy at Shiloh during the American Civil War, Stanley became a journalist, chronicling events in the American west and later in the Ottoman Empire and northern Africa.
Stanley is perhaps less well known by his name than by his most famous quote: "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" Stanley was recruited by the New York Herald to find the explorer, missionary and abolitionist David Livingstone, who had become lost to the western world and who we ran into (in statue form) at Victoria Falls near Livingstone, Zambia. Without knowing anything about Stanley's early life, this is the reason why I sought out his Blue Plaque in London. Anyone generally connected with Livingstone in a positive context is likely OK in my book.
Stanley's Plaque is barely visible in the left side of the photograph above at 2 Richmond Terrace. And yes, that was about as close as we could get. The building is now part of the New Scotland Yard; the two semi-automatic toting policemen we passed about five minutes before I took the picture made me not really want to spend too much time getting the best shot I could. Stanley's Plaque reads "Sir Henry Morton Stanley, 1841-1904, Explorer and Writer lived and died here".
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Sitting on the shelf of my library at home are four cloth-bound hardcover books I bought a long, long time ago when the idea of having a library of classics was a fleeting thought in my head. I got as far as four: Lord Jim and Nostromo by Joseph Conrad, The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck and Moby Dick by Herman Melville. Conrad is one of my all time writer idols and I love Steinbeck (Sweet Tuesday is my personal favorite) but Moby Dick has to be one of the greatest stories of obsession, (attempted) revenge and destruction ever written. It's simply awesome.
Melville lived at the end row house shown above on Craven Street near the Thames for just a few weeks two years before Moby Dick was published. Oddly enough, I felt more emotion on this spot than all the other Blue Plaques we visited. I just thought about how cool it would be to live in this townhouse today knowing that Melville, right before he churned out one of the all-time greatest novels in history, was hanging out there for a little while in the mid 1800s. In a totally sideways thought, if nothing else how much more does it make the end unit here worth. I can't imagine owning this place and sitting in the living room thinking about where Melville might have sat. I'm in awe.
Moby Dick, by the way, flopped when it was first published. Melville never recovered from its failure and became a New York Customs inspector. The irony. There will be more later in this post.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
I have no picture of the plaque celebrating Samuel Taylor Coleridge's time in a building that no longer stands. Not because the Plaque got taken away with the Coleridge's former residence but because the current spot where it is mounted was buried behind the scaffolding surrounding the current building shown above. We just couldn't find it. It was the only one that we looked for that we didn't see.
I hate poetry. Absolutely loathe it. But Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is an exception. I love love love this epic poem of damnation and continual attempted redemption as much for the dark and sinister subject as for the way it is written and reads. It's honestly the only poem I've ever been easily able to understand. For this, Coleridge seems worthy of some honor from me.
Coleridge, along with William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement of English poetry. He was also a lifelong opium addict stemming from his being treated with laudanum as a child for various illnesses. His life was pretty much as I would imagine a successful poet's life: spending time in idyllic landscapes writing verse and traveling while holding administrative posts appropriate to someone of his class. I can completely see Coleridge hanging around in London with Wordsworth or other contemporaries while discussing politics or poetry. The Plaque we didn't see at 71 Berners Street when we were in town is one of two celebrating Coleridge; the other is at 7 Addison Bridge Place.
This is not the first time The Rime of the Ancient Mariner has appeared in this blog. Two years ago, we visited the grave of Gustave Doré in Paris; Doré was an illustrator whose works brought the mariner's tale to life and complement the creepy tale by Coleridge perfectly.
William Wilberforce (1759-1833)
The reason why I've listed the folks whose Blue Plaques I visited this year in reverse order of their birth date is because I wanted to save William Wilberforce until last. I'm assuming most people reading this blog know who Lennon and/or Hendrix were and stand a good chance of recognizing the name of Herman Melville or Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Maybe you can put Rolls with Rolls-Royce and know Stanley if you ever studied explorers. But Wilberforce? He's probably the most obscure of the bunch.
William Wilberforce was a Member of Parliament in the House of Commons representing Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire. He secured his seat in the House by buying votes, a practice apparently customary back about 250 years ago. There were a lot of MPs back in the 1700s and a lot have been forgotten; Wilberforce is still known today because of his leading role in the abolition of the slave trade throughout the British Empire.
The Slave Trade Act of 1807 was passed after a 20 year campaign by Wilberforce and others. The Act, I am sure, did not do everything Wilberforce and his backers hoped it would do. It did not make slavery illegal (just trading in slaves) in Britain or elsewhere in the Empire. But it did start the practice of the Royal Navy punishing (albeit sometimes just through fines) those trading in slaves and did allow Britain to start to pressure other nations to follow suit. It was not an overnight international success story. David Livingstone (yes, the same guy found by Henry Morton Stanley) was still battling the slave trade in East Africa some fifty years later. But Wilberforce's efforts ultimately led to Britain pushing for and securing control of Zanzibar in 1890 with the express purpose of ending the slave trade off the east coast of Africa. Wilberforce moved the ball forward a lot, even if it didn't bring down the entire slave trade worldwide immediately.
This is not the first time we've sought out William Wilberforce in London. We were searching for his tomb in Westminster Abbey two years ago and had to ask for directions. We were led to his memorial by a lady who commented that nobody ever asks to find Wilberforce. On this trip we visited both the Holy Trinity Church on Clapham Common (shown above) where WIlberforce used to worship, along with the spot where he used to live in the Clapham neighborhood just to the west of the Church. Both were worth stopping at to understand his likely walk from home to services on Sunday mornings, although I guess there's some doubt as to the exact location of his house. The current Plaque (shown below) is mounted to a residence of more recent vintage. It's old enough to not be blue.
If you are interested in understanding a little more about Wilberforce, pick up a copy of the movie Amazing Grace. While I'm sure it condenses his 20 year effort to pass the Slave Trade Act and takes a good bit of artistic license, it's worth watching.
We visited these places so we could understand a little bit more about where some historical figures that I admire lived, worked, played and died. That alone was worth it. There are dozens more that could fill future trips but I'm not sure we are going to concentrate on seeking a whole series out on any one vacation after this one.
There was a side benefit in seeking out our eight Blue Plaques and it's the same benefit I often get by walking around cities: finding these landmarks got us walking through some parts of London we never would have been to otherwise. It got us close to 10 Downing Street (the Prime Minister's residence) which I'd never seen before in addition to having a pint or two of Fuller's London Pride at The Bank near Wilberforce's old neighborhood.
But the best thing we came across was a statue of William Tyndale in Whitehall Gardens on our way from Melville to Stanley. Tyndale was the first translator of the Old Testament into English (from Greek). If you had asked me to guess when this translation was first made, I would have taken a stab at somewhere around the turn of the second millennium A.D. and I would have been way wrong. Tyndale died in 1536 possibly while he was still working on the translation. That means that nobody in England had access to the Bible in English before the mid-1500s and honestly not many would have access right after that date either. I'm amazed. Sometimes walking gets you to some unexpected surprises. Ironically, Tyndale was convicted of heresy and executed by strangulation before his body was burned at the stake (I mean, what's the point?). I'll end with that cheery, but also completely medieval, thought.
How We Did It
If you want to take your own Blue Plaques tour through London, I think you have to start with the English Heritage's Blue Plaques website. You can get a listing of all 900 plus Plaques in addition to searching by name or by Borough of London.
I started at the website and reviewed the entire list of all the Plaques and made a sizable list. Then I started to locate them on a map and decided some were so far flung (like Freddie Mercury) that there was no way I'd get to all or even most of the ones I'd picked out for people who I admired or had influenced or improved my life in some way. Here's when the search by Borough came in which helped me get down to about a dozen names which were close to other sites we intended to see on this trip. We ended up ultimately just making it to the eight above, although the Handel next to Hendrix was a nice bonus ninth one.
If you are not into that much planning, there's also a Blue Plaques app, which will use your location to pinpoint Plaques near to your current location. I downloaded, but did not use, the app. I can't imagine me standing in London and checking the app to see whose Blue Plaques I am near on a whim. That might work for other folks; just not for me.
You can spend a lot of time in London finding Blue Plaques. However you do it, make sure you appreciate what you see while you are walking from one to the next. And stop for pints frequently.
If you want to take your own Blue Plaques tour through London, I think you have to start with the English Heritage's Blue Plaques website. You can get a listing of all 900 plus Plaques in addition to searching by name or by Borough of London.
I started at the website and reviewed the entire list of all the Plaques and made a sizable list. Then I started to locate them on a map and decided some were so far flung (like Freddie Mercury) that there was no way I'd get to all or even most of the ones I'd picked out for people who I admired or had influenced or improved my life in some way. Here's when the search by Borough came in which helped me get down to about a dozen names which were close to other sites we intended to see on this trip. We ended up ultimately just making it to the eight above, although the Handel next to Hendrix was a nice bonus ninth one.
If you are not into that much planning, there's also a Blue Plaques app, which will use your location to pinpoint Plaques near to your current location. I downloaded, but did not use, the app. I can't imagine me standing in London and checking the app to see whose Blue Plaques I am near on a whim. That might work for other folks; just not for me.
You can spend a lot of time in London finding Blue Plaques. However you do it, make sure you appreciate what you see while you are walking from one to the next. And stop for pints frequently.
