I looked first for the house in London where, in 1855, Barbara Leigh Smith hosted the first meeting of the campaign for married women’s property rights. A petition to change the law decreeing that husbands owned everything marked the start of her lobbying career. But Blandford Square was remodelled when Marylebone station was built, and the building is long gone.
Then I tried Langham Place near Oxford Circus. Here a plaque marks the site of the Queen’s Hall, destroyed in the blitz, while another commemorates a dinner attended by Oscar Wilde. But there is nothing to mark the place where Barbara and her friends established the English Woman’s Journal and headquarters of their Langham Place group, which campaigned for women’s education and jobs, along with a club that charged members one guinea a year.
