new blue plaques in London
for CLAUDIA JONES
and
MARIE SPARTALI STILLMAN
and
EMILY DAVIDSON
and
SOPHIA DULEEP SINGH
and
ADA SALTER
announced by English Heritage, in its efforts towards gender and diversity levelling
here is the EH press release. Below: The Shrubbery on Clapham Common, the Spartali family home
In 2023 English Heritage blue plaques will be unveiled to, among others: *
Princess Sophia Duleep Singh (1915–1964): Daughter of the deposed Maharajah Duleep Singh (who already has a plaque in Holland Park) and goddaughter of Queen Victoria, Princess Sophia Duleep Singh was an active suffragette and made full use of her royal title to generate support for female enfranchisement. She was a dedicated member of the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU) and the Women’s Tax Resistance League (WTRL). The plaque will mark the large house near Hampton Court Palace which was granted to Sophia and her sisters as a grace and favour apartment by Queen Victoria in 1896.
Claudia Jones (1915–1964): The plaque to journalist and anti-racism activist Claudia Jones will mark the shared dwelling in Vauxhall that was her home for nearly four years, making it her longest place of settled residence in London. It was during this time that Jones founded the West Indian Gazette and came up with the idea of bringing Caribbean carnival to London. The first carnival took place St Pancras Town Hall on 30 January 1959, and later evolved into an outdoor event, the Notting Hill Carnival.
Ada Salter (1866–1942): Ada Salter became Mayor of Bermondsey in 1922 – London’s first female mayor of a London borough and the first Labour woman to be elected as a mayor in Britain. She also served as a Bermondsey borough councillor and represented Bermondsey West on the London County Council. She had a profound and lasting impact on the hitherto deprived borough, which, by the end of the 1930s, boasted a public health service, palatial baths and wash-houses, and ambitious programmes to clear slums, build new housing and playgrounds, and plant thousands of trees. This revolution was largely due to Ada Salter, who never wavered in believing that beauty, health and welfare were inseparable. The plaque will mark the Southwark building where Ada lived in the late 1890s.
Marie Spartali Stillman (1844–1927): As a Pre-Raphaelite model, Marie Spartali Stillman featured in paintings by artists including Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones. While she became renowned for her classic beauty, she was equally admired as painter. Trained by the Pre-Raphaelite painter, Ford Madox Brown, Spartali Stillman was one of only a small number of professional women artists of the late nineteenth century. She will be commemorated in Clapham, at the house where she first began to realise her ambition of becoming an painter.
Emily Wilding Davison (1872–1913): Emily Wilding Davison is one of the best-known suffragettes. Her tireless campaigning for women’s suffrage led to repeated arrests and imprisonment, when she would have endured numerous bouts of solitary confinement and force-feeding. Davison’s actions at the Derby on 4 June 1913 – when an act of protest led to her death – continue to resonate over a century after her death. Her plaque will mark the Kensington house where she lived as she completed her schooling at Kensington High School and embarked on her course at Royal Holloway College, only to have her plans dashed by the severe financial hardship caused by her father’s sudden death.
