Four years ago, the long and winding road finally ended up in Savile Row. To commemorate the 50th anniversary of the final Beatles concert on the roof of No 3, my good friend David Rosen, of Pilcher Hershman (“space agent, not estate agent,” he’ll say, just in case you didn’t know), had successfully lobbied Westminster Council to erect a blue plaque. And so at 8am on April 5, myself, Bill Nighy, the filmmaker Mark Baxter and a bunch of other Beatles nuts turned up to see it installed. We hadn’t come to see the oracle at Delphi, but rather a bloke up a stepladder with a hammer, attaching bronze, stone and lead to brick.
London is now being littered with similar blue plaques, commemorating everything from Jimi Hendrix’s flat next to Claridge’s to David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust photo session in Heddon Street (soon to be turned into a more extravagant Bowie Valhalla by the Crown Estate). Equally, there are dedicatory frisbees acknowledging Bob Marley (Neasden), the Small Faces (Carnaby Street), Pink Floyd (Regent Street), Spandau Ballet (outside the old Blitz club in Great Queen Street) and many more. Just a few weeks ago Pop Art pioneer Pauline Boty was commemorated with a blue plaque for her contribution to the Sixties British art movement (about bloody time!), and during Pride, Sadiq Khan announced five new rainbow plaques celebrating significant people, places and moments in LGBTQI+ history (Beautiful Thing in Greenwich, the Black Lesbian and Gay Centre in Peckham, Jackie Forster in Westminster, the London Lighthouse in Ladbroke Grove, and Section 28 in Haringey).
I think celebrating London’s rich cultural heritage in this way is a wonderful thing, but it’s obviously made me wonder where it might all end (not that it has to). Of course, there is now the opportunity to digitally map as many significant pop cultural moments as you might like, although the whole point of distributing plaques in this way is to acknowledge the physicality of the memory, a madeleine in the shape of a pizza, right in front of our eyes.
We hadn’t come to see the oracle at Delphi, but rather a bloke up a stepladder with a hammer, attaching bronze, stone and lead to brick
I can think of dozens of places I’d like acknowledged by some kind of heritage nod, as I’m sure every Londoner could. For years I had a particular fondness for the rainbow-tiled gents in the original Pizza Express in Notting Hill Gate (odd, perhaps, but they immediately sent me back to what the area must have been like before I moved there), as well as the beautiful Eduardo Paolozzi glass mosaics in Tottenham Court Road underground station. Completed in 1986, they reflected Paolozzi’s interpretation of the local area and his wider interest in mechanisation, urbanisation, popular culture and everyday life. For personal reasons I’d also love one to be erected in the Mayfair Hotel to commemorate the first place I ever had a cocktail — a gigantic Tequila Sunrise, natch, so sophisticated! — in the Beachcomber bar, complete with animatronic crocodiles, pink and green neon and “real” tropical rain. The Beachcomber always gave Trader Vic’s a run for its money and was especially popular with St Martin’s students during the New Romantic period (guilty).
More pressingly, I think English Heritage should have a look at the former BBC Studios in Maida Vale, which have just been bought — rescued more like — for £10.5 million by the much-celebrated composer Hans Zimmer. The iconic studios — there are seven of them in the building — have hosted an array of huge artists who recorded sessions for the BBC, including Beyoncé, Led Zeppelin, The Fall, Nirvana and White Stripes (I once saw Steve Winwood perform an impromptu greatest hits set there, something I’ll never forget). They already have a blue plaque, but considering the wealth of material which has been performed here, by hundreds of performers, I’m thinking that the studios could be in line for an upgrade of some description. I would like to suggest to the powers that be that they commission Kaws to produce a plaque that properly reflects the studios’ IP; no, I’m not suggesting it’s the size of the proposed ferris wheel in Camden, just the height of one of the mansion flats opposite.
Now that would be proper recognition.
Dylan Jones is editor-in-chief of the Evening Standard
