Dame Judi Dench has welcomed a blue plaque hailing the accomplishments of pioneering politician Ada Salter.
The English Heritage plaque can be seen at 149 Lower Road in Rotherhithe where Salter lived in the 1890s.
She went on to transform the lives of thousands of local people by working among the poor of the deprived dockside district of Bermondsey.
Salter, who worked alongside her husband Dr Alfred Salter, supported striking women workers, became the first woman mayor of a London borough when she was elected Mayor of Bermondsey in 1922 and helped introduce a public health service in the area, cleared slums, built playgrounds and planted thousands of trees.
Dame Judi, a patron of the Salter Centenary which marked 100 years since Ada was made mayor, said: “As a champion of environmentalism and the welfare of others, Ada was a force to be reckoned with. We have so much to thank her for and so much that we can still learn from her. I’m delighted to help bring this heroic woman into the public eye.”
Other female firsts celebrated in the Blue Plaques scheme include Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain, Lilian Lyndsay, the first woman to qualify as a dentist in Britain, and Fanny Wilkinson, who was most probably Britain’s first professional landscape gardener and the designer of many London open spaces.
The scheme has been running for more than 150 years. The idea of erecting ‘memorial tablets’ was first proposed by William Ewart MP in the House of Commons in 1863.
The first plaque – to poet, Lord Byron – was erected in 1867.
English Heritage’s Rebecca Preston said: “Ada Salter’s accomplishments were many, and each one highly significant: from her early proposal for a green belt around London, which with her help went on to become law in 1938 whilst she was vice-chair of the London County Council Parks Committee, to the ambitious housing programme which aimed to make Bermondsey a garden city, and the maternity and child-welfare services which were the foundation of the borough’s municipal health service formed under her watch.
“She believed that gardens and playgrounds were integral to a total public welfare programme. Her open spaces were not just green but ablaze with colour: not least from new strains of hardy dahlia – the ‘Bermondsey Gem’ and the ‘Rotherhithe Gem’ – grown by the borough gardeners in their hundreds.”
