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This weeks blog is especially designed to add to your knowledge bank………its about blue plaques…

It’s an oddly fascinating way of keeping up with the neighbours, perusing the list of wi-fi routers within reception distance – and there is a new internet name on my section of the street. Just lately “Blue Plaque” has joined the faceless crowd of “Open zones” and “39FUSIONFIX” I usually hangout with. For a blue plaque on my building announces the one-time occupancy of Alexander Herzen, Russian political thinker, between 1852 and 1864: it actually sold the flat to me when I looked up and saw it when viewing what is now my home. My own blue plaque felt like having a very exclusive membership. It also felt singularly urban. After all, who would care if there was a blue plaque on my house in Norfolk? No one would ever see it, no matter whom it commemorated.

I knew little about Herzen except that he was a dissident, but staring at the crumbling white cake of a house, I imagined glamorous Russians darting about with cloaks and daggers having assignations beneath the dusty chandelier in the hall. I found out more, and I was right: Herzen was dead glamorous. The first self-styled socialist in Russian history, in 1861 he gave a huge party at his dilapidated London mansion, with an orchestra on the balcony, and invited every Russian in London to celebrate the freedom of the serfs. The crowds outside stopped traffic.

Tom Stoppard wrote three plays about Herzen and his gang – Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage - and both Tolstoy and Marx are thought to have visited the house. All this history unleashed by a discreet blue plaque on a stucco wall in Bayswater, where now we are subjected to white vans with CCTV cameras on the doorstep instead of romantic dissidents. How prosaically times have changed.

I love the fact that now the Blue Plaques themselves stop human traffic, and that all of us can take a moment to wonder about the glories and eccentricities of those remembered. Not all are obvious celebrities, but their stories are good: there is the architect Vanburgh who spent some years imprisoned in the Bastille and others residing in Greenwich. Or Cetshwayo, King of the Zulus in the Boer war, who lived in Melbury Road W14 for a bit, and not forgetting Dennis Gabor, inventor of the hologram.

The Blue Plaque scheme was set up in 1866 to make London’s houses their own biographers, and is as eccentric and unique as the men and women it celebrates. People are nominated by the general public (usually their families), scrutinised by a board of the great and good, and have to havebeen dead for at least 20 years, though Ghandi got in after a mere 6.

Many are arts related, although the most recently unveiled was to Sir Jack Cohen, the founder of Tesco He shares his exclusive limelight with, among others, Jimi Hendrix, commemorated, in a pleasing twist, next door to Mozart in Brook Street, and also with Samuel Pepys, and the Big Daddy of body builders, fitness guru Eugene Sandow.

In London, where transience and anonymity obscure much that is interesting and colourful, a blue plaque is a very instant connection between the buildings and a personal aspect of the past. Whether it commemorates the life, the death or dissident whisperings of an occupant, in very few words the writing on each plaque conjures a spirit of London. It tell us what went on with the next door neighbours in a more esoteric yet gripping fashion than analysing the names on the wi-fi router list.

Lived in London: Blue Plaques and the Stories Behind Them
edited by Emily Cole, is published by Yale University Press.

www.english-heritage.org.uk.