London's blue plaques began in 1866 to mark the homes of famous people. Who has Britain chosen to remember on its walls, who has it left out, and where are the plaques?
In 1867 the Society of Arts put up a plaque on the house in King Street, St James's, where Napoleon III had lived in exile. It is the oldest plaque in my data, and the scheme it began is still running. English Heritage and the bodies before it have since named well over a thousand people on the walls of London, and towns and societies across Britain have copied the idea in blue, green, black and brown.
A plaque is a small public verdict on who mattered. So I asked three plain questions of the open data. Who gets one: men or women, writers or engineers, and has that changed? Where are they: is London special, and which towns have most? And who gets more than one? I parsed every row of Wikipedia's lists of English Heritage plaques in London (1,037 plaques naming 1,081 people), took the 5,428 people in Wikidata who have an Open Plaques subject ID, and placed the 6,476 plaques that volunteers have mapped in OpenStreetMap across the UK.
The short answer: the walls remember men, and above all men who wrote, painted or governed. Only 16% of the people named on London's official plaques are women. But that is changing fast: since 2020, 39 of the 72 people newly honoured in London are women.
Each dot is a plaque recorded in OpenStreetMap inside the UK: either tagged as a memorial plaque, or linked to the Open Plaques database. Switch between the colour of the plaque, where a mapper recorded it, and who it names, where the plaque is linked to a person in Wikidata. Tap a dot for its name.
Of the 1,081 people named on the 1,037 English Heritage plaques in London that I parsed, 174 are women: 16%. Wikipedia's article on the scheme says the first woman to get a plaque was the actor Sarah Siddons in 1876; that plaque was taken down when her house was demolished, and the oldest surviving plaque to a woman in my data is Fanny Burney's, put up in 1885.
For a century the share barely moved. Plaques put up by the London County Council between 1901 and 1964 named 22 women among 272 people (8%); the Greater London Council, 1965 to 1985, 23 among 240 (10%). Under English Heritage since 1986 the share is 23%, and the rise is recent and steep: 20% in the 2010s, 40% since 2016, and 54% in the 2020s so far.
Before 2000, about one person in nine honoured with a London plaque was a woman. Since 2020 it is more than one in two.
The same tilt shows in who gets remembered by when they were born. Among the plaque people born in the 1700s, 3% are women; among those born in the 1800s, 17%; among those born in the 1900s, 31%. The wider Open Plaques set in Wikidata, which covers many towns and schemes, is close to London overall: 15% women among 5,410 people, rising from 9% of those born in the 1700s to 17% of those born in the 1900s and 27% of those born since 1950.
I sorted every plaque into an occupation group by the first occupation word in its inscription ("Novelist lived here" is Writing), falling back on the person's Wikidata occupations where the inscription names none. Writers are the biggest group in London, with 227 people (21%), then artists, architects and designers (202), scientists and doctors (139) and politicians, lawyers and public servants (122). Sport has 25, all since 1963.
The mix has shifted. Writing fell from 28% of those honoured by the London County Council to 18% under English Heritage, and politics and law from 17% to 6%. Stage and screen rose from 4% to 10%, music from 4% to 9%, and sport from almost nothing to 4%.
Women are best represented among campaigners and reformers (46%) and on the stage (30%), and almost absent among engineers and inventors (2%). Partly that is history: for most of the period these plaques cover, women were shut out of engineering, the professions and Parliament. Partly it is choice: what the people choosing plaques have counted as eminence.
Of the 6,476 plaques mapped in OpenStreetMap, 1,654 (26%) are in Greater London. London has 15% of the people of England and Wales but 28% of the mapped plaques there: 18.8 per 100,000 residents, against 8.2 in the rest of England and Wales. Counting only plaques linked to the Open Plaques database, the gap widens to 14.4 against 4.0.
But London is not the most plaqued place. Among the 65 built-up areas with at least 100,000 people, London ranks 12th. Cheltenham has 103.5 mapped plaques per 100,000 residents, York 76.0, Oxford 61.9, Bristol 59.3 and Brighton and Hove 53.3. At the other end, Bradford has 3 mapped plaques and Stoke-on-Trent 1.
This is a map of plaques and of mappers. Spa towns, university and cathedral cities and seaside resorts come out high, and so do places where volunteers have linked plaque after plaque to the Open Plaques database: in York 103 of 108 mapped plaques are linked, in Liverpool only 2 of 50. A low count can mean few plaques, or plaques nobody has mapped yet.
Who the plaques name differs a little too. Among plaques linked to a person, 12% of those in London name a woman (656 plaques), against 14% elsewhere (530).
Only 564 mapped plaques carry a colour tag, so this is a sample, not a census. Of those, 52% are blue. But schemes differ: in Bristol 37 of 45 tagged plaques are green, in Thetford and Wheathampstead every tagged plaque is green, and in York all 12 tagged plaques are black.
The oldest-born person with a London plaque of their own is Sir Harry Vane, born in 1613, on a plaque put up in 1897; John Dryden (1631) and Sir Christopher Wren (1632) follow. A street plaque in Essex Street names an even older lawyer, Sir Orlando Bridgeman, born around 1606. The most recently born is Diana, Princess of Wales, born in 1961, whose plaque went up in 2021; before her come the footballer Laurie Cunningham (1956) and the activist Olive Morris (1952). English Heritage asks that a person has been dead for 20 years; in practice the median plaque goes up 51 years after its subject died.
The Open Plaques set reaches much further back, because plaques can mark a legend or a visit: its oldest-born people in Wikidata include Pythagoras and Julius Caesar. It also reaches forward, to living sports people honoured by other schemes.
English Heritage's own rule is one plaque per person in London, but older and multi-name plaques break it: 35 people are named on more than one London plaque in my data, among them William Wilberforce, Samuel Johnson and Elizabeth Barrett Browning on three each. Across the UK, 165 people have more than one mapped plaque linked to them. The most plaqued:
Search by name, word, borough or year. Women are in brick red.
Three sources, three kinds of coverage. The English Heritage London lists on Wikipedia are the most complete: they aim to list every current plaque and give the year each went up. I parsed 1,037 rows; the main list's introduction says 1,018, so the borough lists and the main list have drifted apart a little. Lost plaques are on a separate list I did not use, so early decades count survivors only. Open Plaques and OpenStreetMap are volunteer records: they show what people have photographed and mapped, which varies from street to street and town to town.
Gender is inferred. For 901 of 1,081 London plaque people (83%) I matched a Wikidata item and took its recorded sex or gender. For the rest I used a title in the listing (Sir, Dame, Lord, Lady), then the first name (70 from names in the Wikidata set, 37 from US baby-name records), and checked the remaining 31 by hand against their Wikipedia article titles. A few errors are likely; none is large enough to change the shares.
Occupation groups are rough. They come from the first occupation word on the plaque, then from Wikidata. Many people did several things.
Places are approximate. OpenStreetMap plaques are placed in a region and built-up area by the nearest ONS small-area centroid; populations are Census 2021 for England and Wales only, so Scotland and Northern Ireland have counts but no rates.
London plaques. I parsed the wikitext of Wikipedia's "List of English Heritage blue plaques in London" and its three borough lists (Camden, Kensington and Chelsea, City of Westminster), both the plaque templates and the plain tables, keeping the person, dates, inscription, address and year each plaque went up. People are the linked names in the person column, or, where that column holds an address, in the inscription; buildings, institutions and events are left out (31 plaques).
People. Wikidata items with an Open Plaques subject ID (property P1430), with sex or gender, birth, death and occupations, retrieved through QLever on 27 October 2026; I kept the 5,428 that have a gender or a birth date. London plaque people were matched to them by Wikipedia title or name, checked against birth year.
Places. OpenStreetMap objects in the UK tagged memorial=plaque or openplaques:id, placed by nearest ONS 2021 small area (MSOA population-weighted centroid) into regions and 2022 built-up areas; rates use Census 2021 usual residents.