Flicker Alley plaques reveal innovation hub of early British film industry

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Deirdre Molloy

Earlier in December I met with two resident traders in the bustling sidestreet of Cecil Court to find out more about the plaque-like blue discs dotted round the windows of its many retail outlets. Today referred to as ‘Booksellers Row’ due to its high density of specialist and antiquarian book, art print and map shops, the pedestrian thoroughfare tucked away off Charing Cross Rd has a lesser known but more historically significant identity from around a century ago.


Of the two traders interviewed above, Etan Ilfeld wears several hats: Watkins Books proprietor, Tenderpixel gallerist and digital creative transplanted from America being the simple version. With him was Tim Bryars, whom I first met for November’s interview, owner of an antiquarian maps emporium who also shares his expertise in the field on his rather enchanting blog. Between them they fleshed out the story behind this assemblage of unorthodox blue plaques.

Reliance and De Freece and Dockree plaques in Flicker Alley

The collection of stick-on plaques were put up in 2010 as part of new festival to celebrate the companies, entrepreneurs and pioneers of the British film industry’s birth and early years. ‘Flicker Alley’ as it was dubbed at the time, drew in the first ever film producers-cum-directors (like Cecil Hepworth and French company Gaumont who went onto global fame) alongside rental outlets, film camera manufacturers, projector hire, travelling cinemas (Bioscope et al) and cinematic contraptions of every conceivable sort. There was even a store that dealt soley in chocolate for re-sale in the picture palaces springing up around British cities at the time.

It was a research project undertaken in 2004-2005 by historians Simon Brown and Luke McKernan into the commercial and technological aspects of the London film industry of 1894-1914 that uncovered the exact whereabouts of all the bygone film enterprises clustered here, and produced a fuller portrait of Flicker Alley’s historically neglected significance as a cinematic nerve centre. You can download an essay (PDF format) by Brown that explores the myths and realities of the era.

Flicker Alley dusk at Cecil Court

Flicker Alley was the textbook innovation ecosystem, close proximity and cheap rents enabling the rapid circulation of inventions and expertise and the ad-hoc pooling of resources on a continual basis during the first two decades of film production and cinematic culture. From advice on business matters and film exhibiting, to referral of customers to neighbouring ‘know-how’ through to sharing the costs for joint newspaper advertisements, there was as much collaboration as competition, as these savvy startups and UK outposts for overseas vendors vied to establish, exploit and grow the emergent film sector.

This wasn’t the wealthy heart of the booming industry, but its streetwise front line and inventive marketplace, a technical and commercial testbed. As a fertile staging post for natives on the way up and incomers spreading their reach worldwide, Flicker Alley can reasonably stake a claim as the first global crossroads for the movers and shakers of cinema, set within the broader dynamic of activity around London.

It’s tempting to draw parallels with today’s digital media clusters of Soho, Clerkenwell and Shoreditch made up of varied businesses based around emergent skillsets and technologies, some founded in the dotcom era of 1997-2001 and currently reaching a zenith of sorts in the East London technology quarter of ‘Silicon Roundabout’ aka ‘Tech City‘. With echoes of Flicker Alley’s melting pot dynamic, much is made of the creative intermingling between homegrown internet startups, co-working spaces, digital marketing outfits, and incoming technology giants gathered in the area.

But the differences are more marked. While the digital startup hub of Tech City covers a sprawling geographical area and depends partly on external corporate and government backing for its existence and profile, the upcoming film entrepreneurs of Flicker Alley established their tight-knit network organically, and usually either went bust or upped sticks for Wardour St, Holborn, Ealing, Elstree and overseas once their enterprises outgrew the small units (although Gaumont at one point did knock three units into one!). Ultimately the comparison doesn’t stand up, the times are too different.

Gaumont Hepworth and Graham and Latham plaques Flicker Alley

The Flicker Alley ecosystem morphed through several phases and then dispersed as cinema flourished globally with the axis moving West to Hollywood and expertise extending worldwide. From 1911 onwards the film business gradually ebbed out of Cecil Court, as the industry matured and people moved on. But its impact was far-reaching and legacy indisputable.

Moves are afoot for permanent plaque to mark Flicker Alley – listen to the audio interview for more on that. We’ll keep tabs on how it pans out. In the meantime you can join the dots in this exciting time and place in film and communications history yourself, by checking out the remaining temporary blue plaques on display and the July 2012 Flicker Alley Festival.

In 2010 as part of the inaugural festival programme, with the support of the BFI, they screened the original Alice in Wonderland film (Hepworth, 1903) in the very shop basement above where Hepworth’s blue disc marks the spot. How often can you travel back in time and experience cinematic history with such perfect symmetry as that?

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UK Museums on the Web 2011 storified

Posted on November 29, 2011 by Deirdre Molloy

I went to the UK Museums on the Web conference on Friday as it looked good, but it far outshone my expectations. What really blew me away was the level of discussion and the range of exciting and people-positive things UK museums, gallerys and smaller projects in the related digital heritage ecosystem are doing.

I’d not been before but it felt to me like they (or at least some of the projects in question) had leapfrogged the commercial world and were building out flexible new services with a durable and far-sighted backbone. Well, as far-sighted as you can be with digital development…

Another takeaway for me was while the necessity-driven aspects of innovation are widely touted, what unfolded at #ukmw11 was just as much despite necessity as because of it. Whilst the spectre of unnovation was sulking in the corner somewhere, fostering truer collaboration took centre stage. This was clearest in the open-minded approaches to learning and feedback in ongoing development, and the emphasis on meaning over metrics (although measurement and impact were usefully addressed by Jane Finnis of Culture24).

So alongside hi-res re-usable art digitisation from the National Gallery, mega crowdsouring that humanises structured data about World War One fatalities from the Imperial War Museum and the development of an objects-based collections system for Museum of London’s Picture Bank and Pocket Histories, we also got a peek at the British Museum’s trials of tablet-based augmented reality in elearning, a user-powered accessibilty widget GoGenie (in beta), and the user-centred design process of Pallant House Gallery’s online platform OutsideIn for socially excluded artists to manage and exhibit their work.

In contrast to all the other presentations, the Belgian-based FreeYourMetadata trio chose instead to do some live “cleaning” of messy museum metadata using GoogleRefine on stage. Given how largely impenetrable the details of linked data and the semantic web are to most people, including most people in the digital industries, the relative simplicity and power of this tool sent ripples of excitement round the hall.

I haven’t covered every project that was mentioned but further links to the above initiatives, plus others and some photos from the day are collected in the Storify below.


The day was organised by the UK Museums Computer Group (@ukmcg) and an idea floated on Twitter during the day that they could re-run the ‘hacking and mashups for beginners‘ workshop recently run at Museum Computer Network conference in the USA was something I’d be very interested in attending.

In terms of other coverage, two blog posts by newly elected UKMCG committee member Oonagh Murphy look at the day in more detail and another from David Little on the Digital Humanities staff blog at Kings College London gives a flavour of the design, UX and participatory themes. In turn, Mar Dixon peppers her round-up of the day with a choice selection of tweets, and Claire Ross of UCL gives her slant on the awesome. We’ll add other links to blog coverage here as they emerge, or feel free to add them yourself in the comments.

All in all, lots of food for thought and a few synchronicities with the Open Plaques project. A mention must also go to @RichardOfSussex who I met there. Turns out he’s an Open Plaques contributor and knows a thing or two about the linked data world.

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Pinpointing Mozart’s new plaque via London maps and patterns

Posted on November 24, 2011 by Deirdre Molloy

Until the early part of the nineteenth century the area to the right of London’s Charing Cross Road – then in its previous incarnation as Castle Street – stretching across St Martin’s Lane over to Bedford Street in the heart of Covent Garden, was a much finer gauze of alleys and passageways than the present day street grid. Cecil Court is one of a handful of thoroughfares surviving from that period, and this year became the setting for a new plaque to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Mozart plaque at 9 Cecil Court on Open Plaques website

Last week I went there to meet the man behind the campaign to get the plaque, Tim Bryars, who runs an antiquarian map and topographical print emporium. Inside his compact premises surrounded by stunning old maps and prints Tim told me over a coffee how the plaque came to be put up by Cecil Court Traders Association and unveiled by Simon Callow in September 2011, after attempts to get Westminster Council to support the project failed. Perhaps if they hadn’t done it themselves the celebrations that ensued mightn’t have been on such an operatic scale (see this video for more details).

In turn Tim shed light on the fascinating history of Georgian Cecil Court and the story of the 8-year-old Mozart’s three and a half month stay there as a lodger over John Couzin’s barber shop; a time when the young composer was already coming to the peak of his fame as a performer. Listen to the interview to get the lowdown…

 

Two things from our conversation really struck me – one covered in the interview and one in our long chat afterwards. The first was the effort he went to trace the exact whereabouts of the building Mozart had stayed in. The street was demolished and rebuilt in the late 1880s and early 1890s, and in the 1760s house numbers were not widely in use. The presence on a small street of a barber shop – perhaps with a barber’s pole outside – would suffice to denote the building’s whereabouts in most if not all despatches from that era.

Tim had to sift through a disparate series of old maps, documents and many rolls of microfiche of the parish rate books in the Westminster Archives and elsewhere before working out from the accumulated references to people and places a discernable pattern that finally pinpointed where the former building housing John Couzin’s barbers would be on the newer street layout (see the series of old London maps covering the vicinity). So the plaque is also tribute to an assiduous act of discovery and some serious pattern recognition was at play in the required detective work.

Tim Bryars in his Cecil Court antiquarian map, book and print premises

The other indelible remark Tim made was that he doesn’t want Cecil Court to become a museum piece. In other periods gone by it’s been a hotbed of radical reformism as the key meeting place of the London Corresponding Society, and was at the start of the last century the hub of innovation in the emerging Brtitish film industry (more on that in a future post). Yet despite the pedestrian walkway’s undeniable historical importance and character, Bryars is more concerned it shouldn’t become a rarified island of architectural interest and retail diversity. It’s currently a high-density hotspot of specialist bookshops, whilst the bookstores and other independent businesses of the adjacent Charing Cross Rd have dwindled in recent years.

A great thing about London is its always been a living patchwork of history and local particulars, he added. His remark didn’t stem, I felt, from a narrow zeal to preserve or artisan special pleading but from an appreciation of commercial and civic openness, and the losses incurred (which we can’t recover) once that context is erased.

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You can find Cecil Court on Twitter and Facebook. Tim Bryars is always updating the History of Cecil Court webpage – if you have any new information about the street, please contact him via the email address listed at the top of that webpage. Tim also writes a fantastic antiquarian maps blog Unto the Ends Of the Earth.

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Finding Flann O’Brien: plaques, places, tongues and names

Posted on November 21, 2011 by Deirdre Molloy

Three is a curious number and if he could speak to us now, I wonder what author Flann O’Brien would make of the three plaques in Ireland erected to commemorate him. He’d probably make a darkly memorable quip that appeared at first glance lighthearted. This after all is the writer who brought us (via one of his novels’ characters) the hellishly catchy poetics of “a pint of plain is your only man“. Or he might query the essence of the number itself, turn the glyph on its head and spin it madly. As a satirist and (some say) Ireland’s first postmodernist, his imagination was unbounded.

Brian O'Nolan Flann O' Brien previous plaque at 17 Bowling Green StrabaneAbove is the plaque at his childhood home of 17 Bowling Green. In fact this plaque has been replaced in 2011 by this one but I’d love to know where it’s been retired to!

Unpacking this plaque, we see he was born Brian Ó Nualláin (Brian O’Nolan) 100 years ago on the 5th October 1911 in Strabane, County Tyrone, now a county in Northern Ireland but at the time pre-partition when the whole island was ruled from Westminster. So his nationality is bound up with borders that shifted dramatically in his lifetime.

His mother tongue was Irish, the young Brian speaking no English until he was seven. Hence the bilingual plaques, and his Irish-language novel An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth). But like his near contemporaries Joyce and Beckett he catapulted to the peaks of prose from these margins, doing amazing things with the English language.

O’Nolan left Strabane to attend Blackrock College and then University College Dublin. After that he entered the Irish civil service and remained there for the rest of his working life, supporting a family of ten after his father’s early death. Not for him the forays round Europe and flânuer lifestyle. He was more likely to be found debating life and literature with other local wits in the many pubs of Dublin. But this was the context that fuelled his very particular vision.

Flann O'Brien bronze plaque in Bowling Green StrabaneHis first novel ‘At Swim Two Birds’ (finished in 1939 when he was 27) defies description but this summary of its premise gives a flavour of its workings…

At Swim-Two-Birds presents itself as a first-person story by an unnamed Irish student of literature. The student believes that “one beginning and one ending for a book was a thing I did not agree with”, and he accordingly sets three apparently quite separate stories in motion. The first concerns the Pooka MacPhellimey, “a member of the devil class”. The second is about a young man named John Furriskey, who turns out to be a fictional character created by another of the student’s creations, Dermot Trellis, a cynical writer of Westerns. The third consists of the student’s adaptations of Irish legends, mostly concerning Fin Mac Cool and mad King Sweeney.”

[Source: At Swim Two Birds - Wikipedia]

Three stories within a story… there’s that number again. It might be classed as postmodernism but suffice to say the book is very readable and painfully funny. The same goes for his later novel (now slated to be filmed) The Third Policeman which has cast a long shadow over playful fiction. It was even featured momentarily in season two of Lost in 2005 and Lost scriptwriter and producer Craig Wright suggested it provides a context for Lost’s mythology.

Flann O'Brien Myles na cGopaleen plaque in Blackrock Dublin by SocialscaleNext in our investigation of the plaques we come to the matter of his three names (four if you include the Irish spelling of his first), possibly confusing for the Open Plaques naming system (we currently list two of them). Brian O’Nolan, the civil servant. Flann O’Brien, the pseudonym of the literary author. And Myles na cGopaleen – his pen-name as the famous satirical ‘Cruiskeen Lawn’ columnist for The Irish Times newspaper, a column that brought him more notoriety in his lifetime than his books and made him unpopular with the grandees of the Irish state. The name itself is an odd assemblage, and Brian / Flann / Myles had some arch comments [source] on its interpretation:

Capall is the Irish word for “horse” (from Vulgar latin caballus), and ‘een’ (spelled ín in Irish) is a diminutive suffix. The prefix na gCapaillín is the genitive plural in his Ulster Irish dialect (the Standard Irish would be “Myles na gCapaillíní”), so Myles na gCopaleen means “Myles of the Little Horses”. Capaillín is also the Irish word for “pony”, as in the name of Ireland’s most famous and ancient native horse breed, the Connemara pony.

O’Nolan himself always insisted on the translation “Myles of the Ponies”, saying that he did not see why the principality of the pony should be subjugated to the imperialism of the horse.

Finally, we arrive at the perennially thorny issue of what constitutes a plaque and whether we should include a bronze relief depicting O’Brien that has this year been inset into the pavement outside The Palace Bar in Dublin’s Fleet Street, a celebrated watering hole he frequented along with fellow writers Brendan Behan and Patrick Kavanagh. Is this a plaque, and by who’s reckoning? Are there even any words on it? We wait in readiness until someone verifies this state of affairs more precisely.

I’ve talked mostly about plaques, places, tongues and names here because I can’t do justice to this author’s scabrous columns and mindbending fiction; for that you can look elsewhere. He died on 1st April 1966 and while I’m not sure who the joke was on, the legend on his Dublin plaque states one thing at least that seems unambiguous – Ní bheith a leithéid arís ann (trans: His like will not be here again).

Happy centenary Flann O’Brien. I’m sorry I couldn’t make it to the big celebrations, although I made it to the centenary of Bloomsday in 2004, which you co-organised the very first celebration of in 1954. I hope on your bi and tricentenary, you’ll still set people marvelling and talking.

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Image credits: photographs Creative Commons licensed courtesy of Strabanephotos on Flickr and Heatseeker who donated a photo to us.

If you find further plaques to Flann or anyone else, you can check if we have them listed yet and if we don’t, you can add the information directly to our website. We include plaques globally. See the plaques we currently have for the Republic of Ireland and the UK.

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The People’s Plaques of Islington

Posted on November 2, 2011 by Deirdre Molloy

Two weeks ago we visited the Islington Local History Centre, part of Islington Library, and underneath which you’ll find Islington Museum (@IslingtonMuseum). Yes it’s all about Islington in this post – and Islingtonians! – because Islington Council in London runs a People’s Plaques scheme in which the public can nominate and vote for plaques to be erected in the borough. We thought this warranted a closer look…

The People’s Plaques initiative was started in 2009 with the first plaques being erected in 2010. Local people and events commemorated so far include Mary Wollstonecraft, The Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, and Kenneth Williams. But the council has been putting up (green) plaques for longer than that – George Orwell’s being a famous one – and also lists their own and other plaques within the borough on this A-Z of Islington plaques page. They’re also helping us update our list of plaques erected by Islington Council.

George Orwell plaque courtesy of trailerfullofpix on Flickr

Listen to the audio below for our interview with heritage services manager Cheryl Smith and heritage assistant Ben Smith. We chatted about how the People’s Plaques scheme was born, how their plaque criteria differ from English Heritage’s, the possibility of reusing their data at a History Hackday, plaque design and manufacture, what’s coming up with the next public vote, and more besides…

[Note: the web streaming sound levels are rather low, so I'd recommend listening with headphones or via a connection to external speakers]

 

The Local History Centre and it’s team provide a lot more than plaques: they host and curate the local history archives including a large pool of historic images, maps, census records, and electoral roles. In turn they house several special collections for Islington notables of yore, such as artist Walter Sickert and playwright Joe Orton. They also have a great blog for Sadlers Wells Archive – ballet fans take note!

If that wasn’t enough they also host exhibitions and events, list local walking and cycling tours links, and much more. They’re part of Islington Heritage Services which also runs the Islington Museum (Facebook page) located downstairs and we had a good chat with the museum’s Alex Smith afterwards.

Looking at their site I found that the first mention of Islington can be traced back to an early Anglo-Saxon charter and it was originally named Giseldone, then Gislandune. According to their short history of Islington:

“The name means ‘Gisla’s hill’ from an old Saxon personal name Gisla and dun meaning ‘hill’. According to one early writer, it was a savage place, a forest “full of the lairs of wild beasts”, where bears and wild bulls roamed. On the edges of the forest was a pasture for hogs. In The Domesday Book of 1086 the name had mutated to Isendone, and then Iseldone, which remained in use until the 17th century when it was replaced by the modern form.”

I could go on but you can find out more by exploring from their Heritage Services webpage.

Mary Wollstonecraft plaque courtesy of Open Plaques and Islington Council on Flickr

The blue plaques idea was first conceived of by Liberal MP William Ewart, who went on to co-found the scheme with the RSA in 1866. Another thing Ewart is renowned for is his pioneering advocacy of free public libraries, the formation of which he helped pass into law in 1850.

It’s apt then that our first meeting with council staff to find out about plaques was in a library, when the history of both plaques and public libraries is so intimately connected.

Three final notes for the diary: public nominations for the 2012 People’s Plaques vote open in December 2011 (anyone can nominate and vote – last year they had votes from as far afield as New Zealand!), and two further plaques voted in by the public in 2010 will be put up in 2012 – for Suffragettes martial arts instructor Edith Garrud and Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy author Douglas Adams. We’ll keep you posted on both events here and via Twitter.

[UPDATE 9th January 2012] The Peoples’s Plaques 2012 nominations are now open for the public to input their suggestions. Don’t forget, anyone can nominate, and you can nominate a person, place or event. You don’t have to live in Islington, or even the UK, to nominate but be sure to read the critera before diving in…

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[photos: George Orwell plaque CC licensed courtesy of trailerfullofpix on Flickr, and Mary Wollstonecraft kindly donated by Islington Heritage Services]

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Plaque to the future: the ebook edition

Posted on October 26, 2011 by Deirdre Molloy

Much as we hope Open Plaques will support and expand public exploration of our surroundings past and present, we didn’t imagine a selection of our community’s content gracing an ebook in the Kindle store quite yet. Our mistake clearly, as that’s exactly what’s happened in photographic terms…

Early last month (5th September 2011 to be precise), Simon Harriyott of our team received a message via Flickr about usage of some of our photographs in a forthcoming ebook. The prospect seemed intriguing, and it’s since turned out to be even more complementary to our aims than we’d initially guessed.

London's Blue Plaques In A Nutshell kindle edition by Bill McCannIt seems that almost without realising, we’ve managed to gather together through our user-contributed service a collection of photographs that helps overcome the usual limits of publishing. The ebook in question – London’s Blue Plaques In A Nutshell -  features some 1029 illustrated plaques, 259 photographs of which come from those displayed on the Open Plaques website. Each reproduction is also clearly accredited to its individual creator, in line with the attribution license that photos need to have to be included in our service.

A book is of its time – that’s half its strength and attraction, and central to how we value both the artifact’s meaning and the author’s perspective. But it’s equally true that as our physical landscape changes – and the amount of historical plaques constantly shifts with both losses and gains – something like a “blue plaques guide” is hard to keep current for more than a matter of weeks. Add to that the sheer mass of plaques to be captured (we currently have 1,625 listed in London) and in this scenario the digital, community-driven collection comes up trumps.

The Contents area of the ebook divides the plaques up into 21 categories, framed by what the person commemorated is most notable for (the nearest equivalent on the Open Plaques site being ‘roles‘). Most are quite precise such as literature, science, theatre, music and politics; the notable exception is ‘overseas visitors’ (this category has some 53 entries, including Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Karl Marx and Napoleon). Of course the ebook also allows you to navigate freely between plaques, with the categories acting as a useful but optional pathway.

James Boswell plaque by Simon Harriyott“A native of Scotland, Boswell, was forced to spend a lot of his time in Edinburgh practising Law with a distinct lack of enthusiasm.

Long known only as the friend and biographer of Samuel Johnson the recent publication of Boswell’s journals revealed one of the world’s greatest diarists.

Boswell was gregarious, high-spirited, sensual, attractive to women and he found in London the combination of gross and refined pleasures that he needed.”

The Open Plaques team is delighted to help facilitate a project produced by someone who has real form in uncovering and curating London’s past and is also a veteran of the digital space. After obtaining at PhD in physical chemistry, author Bill McCann researched and lectured at Imperial College London, before joining the Museum of London where he worked as an archaeologist and managed a geophysical laboratory.

Whilst there, McCann made an interesting intervention in the debate around the likely architectural accuracy of the replica Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre three years after it opened in 1996. From from 2000 to early 2011 he also ran StoryOfLondon in his spare time – a website that explored “the odd and unusual” history of the capital. Snapshots of this can still be viewed in the WayBackMachine part of the Internet Archive project, but the site is due to be revived shortly.

Bill has always been interested in language, and moved to China as a TEFL teacher in January 2006. He has now settled in Suzhou, and has developed a keen interest in Chinese dialects, particularly those of Wu group, of which Suzhouhua is the premier dialect. He is currently the Associate Editor for China on the International Dialects of English Archive.

The preface of the ebook also adds this illuminating detail:

“The origins of this book go back to 2004 when I worked with Robbie Stamp and Stuart Williamson on a project that would have delivered short stories from history directly to people’s mobile phones.

At that time I wrote a single aphorism for each of the Blue Plaques in Central London and these, together with short biographies of selected individuals, were to be recorded and made available to anyone dialling a special number on his or her phone. A number were indeed recorded by Stephen Fry and Joanna Lumley, but alas, the project was  ahead of its time, and the necessary start-up financial backing proved elusive.”

There’s a parallel of sorts with another project then engrossing one of McCann’s partners. Robbie Stamp who had co-founded the collaborative online encyclopedia h2g2 with Douglas Adams, was at that time also executive producing the film of Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy, released in 2005, a project that itself had struggled for several years through many incarnations and funding hurdles before coming to fruition.

The trio of McCann, Stamp and Williamson were indeed ahead of their time with their portable history project. Seven years on, we’ve finally squared the circle: ebooks and the evolution of the web more broadly has caught up with their vision.

Mindful too of the time constraints imposed upon busy urbanites and any rushed visitor to the capital, the textual content attached to each each plaque entry has retained the aphoristic brevity first planned by McCann in 2004.

Nancy Astor plaque by Simon Harriyott“The 1st woman to sit in the House of Commons, Nancy Astor’s sharp and acid wit was more than a match for her male colleagues, including Winston Churchill.

She was led into the House of Commons by Arthur Balfour and Lloyd-George, both of whom had said that they would rather have a rattlesnake in the House than her.

Mr Speaker advised her against wearing hats in the House; changes in fashion would excite idle comment. Ignoring him, she wore a toque on her first day.”

The rabbit hole with any plaque and its underlying story – should you chose to select it – is yours to plunge down, via the Wikipedia links on the Open Plaques website and in many other places. But as a starting point for Kindle users to explore and discover six centuries of London encapsulated in plaques, this looks like a great primer.

If you happen to get this ebook (available via Amazon UK, USA, France and Germany) we’d be very interested to hear your thoughts on it.

[Note: Quoted extracts from the James Bowell and Nancy Astor plaques, and the preface, are copyright of the author Bill McCann]

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WhereCamp EU 2011, Berlin

Posted on May 24, 2011 by Jez Nicholson

Open Plaques are proud and excited to be attending WhereCamp EU in Berlin this Friday the 27-28th May. Our representative will be me! Jez Nicholson. I am one of OpenHeritage C.I.C.’s directors and an openplaques.org dev.

WhereCamp is an unconference, meaning that everyone who attends also gives a talk. This leads to lots of ideas and loads of new contacts. I shall probably be speaking on openplaques and some of the issues that it has brought up. I also intend to have a bit of a plaque hunt as i’m sure that there are more than the 4 that we currently have in Berlin.

Talking of countries, I now see that we have plaques from 19 different countries on openplaques

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Blue plaque art action in SW15

Posted on May 18, 2011 by Deirdre Molloy

A blue plaque event with a twist is due to touchdown in Putney, south west London this Sunday 22nd May. It won’t resemble your average ceremony, although there will be some ‘unveilings’. In the shape of customised plaques that come and go (and other objects), things about people, place, history and memory will be uncovered in the timeframe of an afternoon in this community-based visual arts event curated by Rob Drummer. Tracing back and forth in time is about to get lively in SW15…

The action of Something Important Happened Here centres on Deodar Road, which runs parallel to the Thames one street back from the river on the south side, halfway between Putney Bridge and East Putney tube stations.

On his blog Rob, a theatre director and artist, outlines the event’s format.

The installation consists of numerous blue vinyl discs, similar to English Heritage Blue Plaques, temporary but providing splashes of colour along the street on buildings, pavements, lampposts and other surfaces where something important has happened. The installation in places is modified to suggest activity, some of the plaques are to be unveiled throughout the day, some installed and taken down – some appearing over the previous night but all vanishing at the end.

He explains how the installation has been assembled in collaboration with local residents:

The work is an attempt to tell the stories of the community, based upon direct conversation with them, drawing upon memory and recent events, their family history and anecdotes. Alongside these and part of the weave of a fictional heritage being created are alternative mentions, names, events commemorated in the same style.

For more, go read Rob’s full blog post.

Embedded in the street-level installation event, which fuses the real and imagined, there’s a sense of pushing back against prevailing currents. Something about Something Important Happened Here pokes playfully at our shrinking sense of roots and shared identity in the cityscape, and asks how we might reconstruct and make sense of it. But far from didactic or conclusive, it’s refreshingly open-ended.

This move to share and discover real and invented memories by annotating our public space has more verve and audacity than Big Lunchism. The chance to pro-actively mark-up and interrogate your area is at several removes from the ersatz community spirit imbibed with outdoor tea and cupcakes (no offense meant to cupcake fans, obviously). There’s no apparent moral to this temporary plaque assemblage; it’s less about craving stability and more about being curious.

Some might say there’s still a nostalgic undercurrent at work here, but looking back to your connection to a place isn’t the same as being backward looking. Mapping the contours of your past sheds light on now and reveals hidden connections. Something Important Happened Here is bound to surface the unexpected and unlock some intriguing insights into the local experience.

A mischievous note is sounded in Rob’s mention that it won’t be entirely trustworthy, but that’s half the adventure. It’s not meant to be reliable or verifiable guide in the way blue plaques ‘set in stone’ [mostly] are, but as a momentary explosion of personal points of reference it’s set to be eye-opening.

It all adds up to a vital reminder that home-made or official, factual or fake, the blue plaque concept is a token of our own making.

[image courtesy of Rob Drummer]

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Something Important Happened Here happens 1pm -5pm, Sunday 22nd May 2011.
Meeting Point: Deodar Road, Putney, London SW15.

Follow @Robert_ad on Twitter.
Event hashtag: #DeodarRd

The event is part of the closing day of Wandsworth Arts Festival – more news on their Facebook page

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Double Plaques

Posted on March 9, 2011 by Simon Harriyott

Suzi Catherine pointed us to this question by Ben Lishman in a newspaper:

@openplaques Second Q in Notes and queries looks like a job f... on Twitpic

“Are there any houses with more than one blue plaque?”

I could think of three immediately, and looking through my Flickr photos, I found a few more:

Thomas Wakley and Thomas Hodgkin

Bedford Square

Wakley and Hodgkin plaques

Captain Frederick Marryat and George Grossmith Junior

Spanish Place, Westminster

Captain Frederick Marryat and George Grossmith Junior plaque

Sir Walter Besant and Hugh Gaitskell

Tucked away down a drive in the corner of Frognal Gardens, Hampstead.

Sir Walter Besant and Hugh Gaitskell plaques

Sigmund and Anna Freud

Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead

Sigmund and Anna Freud plaques

Sir William Orpen and Hugh Lane

South Bolton Gardens, Earl’s Court

Sir William Orpen and Hugh Lane plaques

This one I found exactly one week ago.

There are also two on The Lansdowne Club in Berkeley Square (William Petty and Harry Gordon Selfridge), and two at the entrance of Chiltern Court, Baker Street (H.G. Wells and Arnold Bennett).

Outside of London, there are two different plaques for Charles Darwin on the same building in Cambridge, two on (what was) the Corn Exchange in Tunbridge Wells (Edmund Kean), but the winner, with three plaques, is Beach House in Worthing.

Beach House, Worthing plaques

If you know of any other buildings with more than one plaque, please add a comment.

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History Hack Day

Posted on January 25, 2011 by Tom Morris

This past weekend was the world’s first History Hack Day at The Guardian offices in London. This follows on from an increasing specialisation of hack days: we’ve gone from general hack days to hack days specifically on mobile technology (Over the Air), Twitter (WarbleCamp), science, music, charity, culture and now history.

The weekend was put together by Matt Patterson who started the event by describing a vision of how a now ubiquitous web tool like Google Maps could have layers of the past attached. Imagine pulling out your smartphone and in addition to showing you the route from the railway station to the pub, it’d also show you what the streets used to be called, the industries and trades that used to operate where the identikit shopping centre now lies, a few glimpses into the sort of people who lived here and the ideas, rituals and objects they centered their lives around.

Jez Nicholson, Simon Harriyott and I were there to fly the flag for Open Plaques. We helped a few hackers use the Open Plaques data but also worked on our own projects. But for me, as well as slinging Ruby and SQL and Java and what not, it was interesting to see what people were building on a purely academic level. While there are APIs and open data sets becoming available for pots and pans and buildings, the next step for me is to integrate the history of ideas: I think the history of philosophers, religious figures, writers, scientists and most importantly their ideas frame the world as much, if not slightly more, than kings, tyrants and presidents.

With that said, let’s have a look at what people did build, some of which used data from Open Plaques:

First up, Simon Cross (from Facebook) and Seyi Ogunyemi built an Open Plaques hack in Python called Plaquathon which used Facebook Places to let you check into plaques. At the Open Plaques Open Day last year, integration with location-based social networking or some kind of social game aspect to Open Plaques seemed like something we’d like to have, so it was nice to see this being put together so quickly.

Data from Open Plaques was also used by Morena Fiore and Chris Lock in a hack called “Price Re-enactment Adjustment Tool” (or “PRAT” for short) which showed (with a good deal of guesswork and fiction!) the effect of the Blitz on house prices. Buildings getting blown up nearby tended to lower house prices, while a celebrity moving in bumped the price back up. And by ‘celebrities’, they mean someone with a plaque. Finally: a piece of software that thinks Bertrand Russell is more worthy of the title ‘celebrity’ than Kerry Katona.

There were two trains-related hacks: Paul Downey and his son Jed attempted to uncover details about historical railways, while Simon Harriyott built geStation, which shows the evolution of the UK’s rail network from 1786 onwards and used dbpedia, the RDF version of Wikipedia. (We’ll have to wait for “transport hack day” before someone builds a hack to make the trains actually run on time!)

Wikipedia data was behind some other hacks too: Mike Stenhouse’s Pokemonarchs attempted to build a Pokémon-style card game from people, with importance derived from the number of results from Google Scholar, while the amount of edits to the person’s Wikipedia article measuring the amount of controversy they cause (George W. Bush, who has 40,723 edits, squarely beats both Jesus and Adolf Hitler on that front).

Also using Wikipedia data was Gareth Lloyd and Tom Martin’s History of the World in 100 Seconds which plots geotagged historical events on a map over time and shows how Western-centric history is, how Western-centric Wikipedians are (they acknowledge that), or possibly both.

My own modest little hack is one to try and get more people out there creating free culture by photographing objects and places in the real world that have been requested by free culture projects in response to them “checking in” on location-based services like Foursquare. Currently, it is for Wikipedia, but will hopefully also integrate with Open Plaques. With a bit of luck, someone will check into a café for lunch and their phone will tell them to go and take photos of plaques and Roman ruins and other bits of urban miscellany. Rather than tie myself down to any specific mobile platform, I’m building a web front end and also a Twitter interface because that’s a lot easier than learning, oh, Objective-C, Cocoa, the Android APIs, C#, XNA and the Windows Phone APIs. Interestingly, I don’t think we saw any hacks presented that were built for a specific mobile platform rather than for the Web.

Cristiano Betta produced a hack that was rated ‘Best of Show’ by the judges: a mobile version of A History of the World in 100 Objects, such that you can listen to the BBC programmes on a smartphone while seeing the real object in the British Museum. Cristiano has written it up for his blog.

One of the more surreal hacks was Brian Suda’s ‘Titanic Matching’ app which lets you call up on a phone and matches you to a Titanic passenger, then tells you what happens to them.

No hack day would be complete without something very silly from Tom Scott, and this time it was an app called “The Magical Mystical Ley Line Locator” which takes your postcode and shows you all the mystical ley lines you might be on. ‘Mystical’ being a code word for bullshit, of course.

While hack day projects often do not turn into enduring projects (Open Plaques itself is one that did!), they do showcase what amazing things people can do when dosed up on caffeine and pizza and given access to data. For me, they vindicate the openness of projects like Wikipedia and Open Plaques, and hopefully serve as an invitation to companies and governments to join the web of linked data, preferably linked open data.

Also, be sure to go and read Jeremy Keith’s blog post about the event.

[image courtesy of Adactio on Flickr]

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