List of former English Heritage blue plaques

This is a list of the blue plaques placed by English Heritage and its predecessors in the boroughs of London, the City of Westminster, and the City of London that are known to have been lost, replaced, or otherwise removed from the official London-wide commemorative plaque scheme. In some cases plaques have been recovered and preserved and, in a few cases, re-erected with or without the blessing of those administrating the scheme.

The scheme began in 1866. It was originally administered by the Society of Arts which referred to the plaques erected under its auspices as 'Memorial Tablets' (sometimes 'Memorial Tablets of Great Men And Events' or 'Memorial Tablets of Eminent Men') until December 1901 when, by agreement and with the encouragement of the Clerk to the Council Laurence Gomme, it was taken over the London County Council which christened it 'Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London'. The LCC ran the scheme until the County of London was abolished in 1965 when its successor body the Greater London Council (GLC) took charge and expanded the scheme into the newly created outer boroughs. With the abolition of the GLC in 1986, administration of the official London-wide blue plaque scheme passed to English Heritage.

During the first 150 years of the of scheme's operation, it was estimated that just over 100 houses bearing plaques had been demolished including 12 destroyed in the 1939-1945 war. The rules for the scheme, established by the Society of Arts in the early years of its operation, adopted and expanded on by the LCC in 1903 and formalised in 1954, require that plaques may generally only be affixed to a surviving building with a close association to the person commemorated. A practice whereby plaques would sometimes be re-erected at rebuilt properties with an explanatory supplementary tablet ceased in 1938. The post-1954 'authenticity rule' was relaxed on occasion by the LCC and GLC, but in the English Heritage era this has not been the case. If, after the loss of a commemorated building and retrieval of the plaque an appropriate alternative London address cannot be identified, it cannot be reaffixed to the new building or remain part of the scheme. Houses bearing plaques to Captain Oates, Edward Lear and Hugh Dowding have been lost in recent years, there being no surviving alternative London address for any of these, whereas it has been possible for English Heritage to authentically re-site the plaque to Lilian Lindsay after the house to which it had originally been affixed was knocked down, an alternative residence having been identified. On the odd occasion that a scheme plaque attached or re-attached to an inauthentic address by one of English Heritage's predecessors has been removed then re-erected as the result of subsequent redevelopment, the plaque has been allowed to remain in the scheme after rebuilding.

Indication of houses of historical interest in London
During the period 1867–1902, the Society of Arts recorded the bare details of the 'memorial tablets' erected under its auspices in the periodical The Journal of the Society of Arts. After taking over the scheme, the London County Council issued a series of booklets detailing the work it was undertaking, each entitled 'Indication of Houses of Historical Interest in London' with a Roman numeral to indicate the order of publication. Each of these recorded the particulars of three or four recently erected plaques and included a short biography of each individual commemorated, details of the connection between person and property, and a simple line drawing of each plaque. Approximately 80 of these were published between 1903 and 1936. The booklets were also compiled and published as six hard bound volumes, issued in 1907, 1909, 1912, 1923, 1930 and 1938. These were followed by a 'New Series' of 4-page leaflets each dealing with one house; these were numbered NS1 to NS8 and covered plaques erected between 1937 and 1940. References by the LCC to plaques erected by the Society of Arts were confined to the appendices of the first and fifth hardbacks, in a list of memorials erected by other organisations besides itself. Only the plaque to Sarah Siddons, erected by the SOA in 1876 and re-erected by the LCC in 1905 with a supplementary tablet, was given its own illustrated 'chapter'.

After the 1939–1945 war, simplified plaque lists were published by the LCC in 1947, 1952 and 1960 ('Commemorative Tablets on Houses of Historical Interest', the latter of which records the full inscriptions of the surviving Society of Arts plaques for the first time), and by the GLC ('Blue Plaques on Houses of Historical Interest in London') in 1971. The GLC published an expanded version of the latter featuring a pull-out map indicating the locations of the 365 plaques then in existence, in 1976.

Official publications from the English Heritage era include the coffee-table sized Lived In London: blue plaques and the stories behind them by Emily Cole, published in association with English Heritage in 2009, and The English Heritage Guide to Blue Plaques by the scheme's senior historian, Howard Spencer, first published in 2016, a revised and updated second edition appearing in 2019.

To date, no definitive list of plaques lost to the official London scheme has been published. Identifying them is a matter of reconciling historic sources to the list of plaques maintained by English Heritage. In many cases, the fate of the building to which a lost plaque was affixed can be determined via the pages of the Survey of London.

Plaques lost
This section records plaques removed from the official London Blue Plaque Scheme after the demolition of the building to which they were affixed.


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Plaques replaced
This section records plaques which have been replaced due to damage, manufacturing error or biographical error with a new plaque at the same location.


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Plaques preserved
This section records plaques that, though removed from the official London Blue Plaque Scheme, still exist. The 'location' column indicates the current location of the plaque, not its original site. It is not uncommon for recovered plaques to be donated to museums or the plaques original sponsors. English Heritage is known to have a small collection, the contents of which are not in the public domain.


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Non-scheme plaques
This section records plaques which have never formed part of the official London-wide plaque scheme but, bearing the name of one of the custodians of the scheme, are included for the sake of completeness.


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