Blue plaques

In the face of a lack of diversity in blue-plaque schemes, a programme in Tyne and Wear commemorates notable women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

Susan Mary Auld’s shipbuilding designs included the D-Day landing vessels.

‘Blue plaques’ are probably the best-known national physical commemoration scheme for marking places associated with notable figures or events. Yet only in 2024 have we seen the advent of a national (in England) blue plaques scheme, to be led by Historic England. English Heritage has managed a blue-plaques programme in London since 1986, inheriting a scheme that has its origins in 1866. English Heritage plaques are subject to strict criteria, including that any recipient must have been dead for at least 20 years, and that there should be a surviving building closely associated with the person in question. Outside London, provision is common but has always been patchy. Many local schemes have come and gone, operating in different ways to different designs and criteria, and many parts of the country have no provision at all.

The authors of this article have undertaken a project in partnership with the Common Room of the North in the former metropolitan county of Tyne and Wear, to install five plaques to women who played a significant role in STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). Both of us are members of Newcastle City Council’s Historic Environment Advisory Panel (HEAP). One of the functions of HEAP is to advise the council on its sustained, if modest, blue plaques programme, with typically two to three plaques installed each year. An audit in 2019 revealed a shocking, if not surprising, lack of diversity in terms of plaque recipients. Of the 115 plaques then extant, 77 referred to an individual (a total of 52 individuals when accounting for multiple references to a few particularly celebrated figures). Six plaques in total memorialised women and one a black man, Frederick Douglass.

This lack of diversity in blue-plaque programmes, or indeed heritage interpretation more broadly, is not particular to Newcastle. English Heritage acknowledges it as an issue in the London scheme, where 15 per cent of blue plaques celebrate women. London has had the scale and resources to address this, and since 2016 has been running a ‘plaques for women’ campaign. English Heritage is also trying to highlight significant figures linked to LGBTQ+ issues, disability and London’s black history. A systemic lack of diversity has stimulated other responses in various places across the country.

Two of our students researched examples [1]. They found, for instance, in London, the Highgate Pink Plaques programme, which focuses on commemorating women, with less restrictive criteria than the English Heritage scheme. In York, a temporary rainbow-plaque project, with the aim of making ‘the city and its buildings become visibly queer [2]’, has led to a permanent plaque to Anne Lister, ‘lesbian and diarist’. In critical dialogue with existing memorialisation, staff and students at Exeter University have produced mock blue plaques to reinterpret commemorated figures from the history of the city, often in relation to the city’s colonial past. The temporary plaques are located alongside existing memorials or, for example, street names, highlighting the injustices that historical figures from the city may represent.

We began to think about how plaque provision could be diversified in our own city, and a more representative history told. Inspired also by the ‘Rebel Women of Sunderland’ project, and a plaque produced by colleagues at Sunderland University to Dr Marion Phillips MP, and a plaque to Quaker women and their antislavery activity in Sunderland, we wanted to do something at a more regional scale. We sought to connect with the other Tyne and Wear authorities, asking whether and how plaques are installed in Gateshead, Sunderland, North Tyneside and South Tyneside. We had the additional objective of wanting to bring colleagues in these areas together to share knowledge and experience: the sort of cross-boundary sharing that has often been ground out of professional life as austerity has imposed more pressured and instrumental ways of working.

It transpires that all five areas have a small programme of plaque installation, but each organised in different ways and to different criteria, although typically these are an adaption of those used by English Heritage. In Newcastle, the historic environment team advises HEAP on publicly received nominations on an annual cycle. South and North Tyneside councils both run plaque schemes, although with variations in detail from Newcastle. For example, in North Tyneside there are no published criteria or any established nomination process, and in practice there has been an emphasis on linked stories, such as the borough in the first world war. Sunderland City Council does not fund a scheme but seeks to facilitate the efforts of others and record those installed. In Gateshead, blue plaque installation is currently run by the local history society.

We wanted to promote a more strategic and themed approach. The intention was not to interfere with proposals emerging in any of the five boroughs, but to acknowledge that incremental additions to plaque provision would probably never achieve more inclusive understandings of the history of place. We were fortunate in securing funding through our university[3] sufficient to support the installation of one plaque in each of the five Tyne and Wear areas. We focused on a theme of women in STEM as an important and underrepresented area.

The theme enabled us to work in partnership with the Common Room of the North[4]. In practice, most of the work of implementation was led by colleagues at the Common Room, who liaised with the five local authorities over potential recipients for plaques, undertook historical and location research, negotiated with owners and occupiers, navigated permissions, commissioned manufacture, organised installation events and, crucially, developed a wider interpretation scheme around ‘Inspiring Pioneers: celebrating women of the region who inspired great change’. None of us anticipated just how protracted an exercise this would be. It was a hard reminder that it can be a long haul from having an agreement on a suitable plaque recipient to celebrating installation. We first talked to the Common Room in January 2022, and the fifth and final plaque was installed on the Tyne Bridge in March 2024. Collectively, the plaques tell a story of women breaking into traditionally male professional spaces and opening the way for others to follow, a role Buchanan explicitly reflected upon.

The plaque in Newcastle commemorated Rachel Parsons (1885–1956), and her mother Katherine, Lady Parsons (1859–1933). Rachel was one of the most remarkable women of her generation, both as an engineer and a feminist trailblazer. She was the first woman to study engineering at Cambridge University (1910–12) and the first to sit on the board of a major industrial concern, CA Parsons and Co. There, during the first world war, she trained female workers in the construction of steam turbines for energy generation. After the war, Rachel was a leading light in the National Council of Women, and in 1919 she became the founding president of the Women’s Engineering Society. Among the first women elected to the London County Council, Rachel later stood for Parliament in the 1923 general election and campaigned ceaselessly for equal pay and employment rights.

Four other remarkable women were commemorated. Susan Mary Auld (1915–2002, North Tyneside), the first woman to be awarded a degree in naval architecture from Durham University in 1936, worked in the design office of Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson at a time when very few women were employed in shipbuilding. Jennie Shearan (born Eliza Jane Cain, 1922–2005, South Tyneside), an environmental campaigner, ignited a national dialogue about the health risks from the pollution that she and her neighbours had to endure from the Monkton coke works. She set up Hebburn Residents Action Group and took their case all the way to the European Parliament.

Dorothy Donaldson Buchanan (1899–1985, Gateshead), the first female member of the Institution of Civil Engineers, passing the institution’s admission examination in 1927, was part of their design team for the Tyne Bridge and the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Hope Winch (1894–1944, Sunderland) was the founder and head of the pharmaceutical department at Sunderland Technical College in 1928, predecessor to the University of Sunderland.

Inspiring Pioneers has been a great deal of work and represents a very modest contribution given the scale of the rebalancing task required to more fully reflect the stories that should be told and the people who should be commemorated. We very much welcome other initiatives, such as African Lives in Northern England, Here North East and Lost History of Women Shipbuilders, which all aim to develop more diverse interpretations of our heritage.

We must keep asking who is celebrated, cared for, commemorated, and who is not. The advent of a national scheme is encouraging but, we anticipate, tiny in terms of the scale of the challenge. We saw this as a pilot project, a modest more programmatic approach. The responsive schemes that exist in Tyne and Wear are valuable but insufficient. We would like to see regular themes emerging, accompanied by broader education programmes, as with Inspiring Pioneers.

• 1 Laura Slevin and Erin Gallagher
• 2 Kit Heyam (undated) Rainbow Plaques: making queer history visible
• 3 Newcastle University Policy Support QR fund, Towards more inclusive heritage policies: ‘blue plaques’ in Tyne and Wear (January 2022– June 2022)
• 4 We would like to thank our colleagues at the Common Room, Liz Mayes, Emily Tench, Josh Ansell, Lauren Sanderson, Luca/Lux Cepollaro and Alex Stewart. The Common Room was established in 2017 to lead the redevelopment and manage the assets of the North of England Institute of Mining and Mechanical Engineers.

This article originally appeared in the Institute of Historic Building Conservation’s (IHBC’s) Context 181, published in September 2024. It was written by John Pendlebury, professor of urban conservation and Loes Veldpaus senior lecturer in architecture and urban planning, both in the school of architecture, planning and landscape at Newcastle University.

--Institute of Historic Building Conservation

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