London’s blue plaques, counted: who gets one, and which districts have none
This page counts 1,035 blue plaques in the scheme English Heritage runs in London. 166 of them are in W1, about one in six, and 31 of the 120 districts with London postcodes (E, EC, N, NW, SE, SW, W and WC) have none. Of the plaques that honour a person, about one in seven is to a woman (152 of 1,010).
Or a district:
Any Greater London postcode works, RM14 and CR0 included. Or pick a point on the map.
Counted from Open Plaques’ record of December 2025 and 16 official plaques it does not have yet; the official scheme is the one English Heritage runs today.
The map could not be drawn here. Every plaque and every district is in the lists further down.
Blue discs: the official scheme. Pick any point on the map to find the plaque nearest to it.
Many bodies put up blue plaques. This page counts the scheme the others followed: proposed in the House of Commons by William Ewart in 1863, begun by the Society of Arts in 1866, passed to the London County Council at the turn of the century, to the Greater London Council in 1965 and to English Heritage in 1986.
Open Plaques, a volunteer record of plaques in the public domain, marks that scheme’s plaques apart from all the rest: 1,019 in December 2025, once 63 disputed records had been checked one by one. With 16 more that the record does not have yet, most of them put up in 2025 and 2026 and taken from Wikipedia’s list, this page counts 1,035. English Heritage’s own search lists 1,037; its website does not allow that list to be republished.
The oldest still on a wall is to Napoleon III in King Street, St James’s, put up in 1867 while he was alive. The scheme’s first, to Byron in the same year, went when the house was demolished in 1889.
W1 holds 166 official plaques: Mayfair, Marylebone, Soho and Fitzrovia. SW1 has 92, NW3 (Hampstead) 71, WC1 (Bloomsbury) 53 and W8 (Kensington) 49. Those five districts hold 431 of the 1,035: 42%. By the addresses English Heritage prints, W1 has 164: a plaque close to a boundary can fall either way.
The W, SW, NW and WC districts together have 844. The E, N, SE and EC districts have 140. Another 51 are in the outer districts, from Twickenham to Ilford.
The rules partly explain it. A plaque needs a building the person would recognise, still standing and visible from the street; and the City of London has kept its own scheme since the 1870s, which is why EC is nearly empty of official plaques.
31 of the 120 London postal districts have no official plaque on record: E2, E4, E5, E6, E7, E11, E15, E16, E18, E20, N2, N3, N7, N11, N12, N14, N15, N18, N19, N20, N21, NW9, NW10, SE2, SE6, SE8, SE18, SE27, SE28, W7 and W13. Another 27 have exactly one.
Each plaque was placed in the district of the postcode nearest to its recorded position, so a plaque on a boundary can land on the wrong side. English Heritage’s own list, read by the districts it prints, leaves the same 31 empty.
English Heritage says there are now plaques in all but two of London’s 32 boroughs, Havering and Hillingdon. Boroughs are large; districts show the gaps inside them.
This page holds 3,942 plaques in Greater London: the 3,926 Open Plaques records and the 16 added from Wikipedia. The official scheme accounts for about a quarter. The rest name 563 other bodies, or no body at all (969).
The bodies named most often: the Corporation of London (177, rectangular and blue), Westminster City Council (162, most of them green), Southwark (68), the Nubian Jak Community Trust (60), which commemorates prominent Black historical figures, Hackney (55) and Islington (49).
Counted this way, only SE28 and W13 have no plaque of any kind on record among the 120 London districts. The marks on the map take the colour written in each record: 2,206 are recorded as blue.
Measured from every postcode in the 120 London districts, in a straight line: the nearest official plaque is 569 m away at the median, and 64% of postcodes have one within 800 m, which the Department for Transport’s street manual treats as about ten minutes on foot.
With every scheme counted the median falls to 252 m, and 90% of postcodes are within 800 m of some plaque.
Across the whole of Greater London the median distance to an official plaque is 948 m. The farthest postcode is in RM14, 16.1 km from the nearest. A walk along streets is longer than a straight line.
Of the 1,010 official plaques whose main subject is a person, 152 honour a woman: 15%. English Heritage’s own figure is 15 per cent. The other 25 mark places, events and organisations.
Each dot is one plaque, stacked by the decade it went up; 99 have no year in the record. The scheme put up 82 plaques in the 1950s and 127 in the 1990s.
Since 2016, when English Heritage began asking the public to nominate more women, 43 of the 112 dated plaques to a person in this record are to a woman. English Heritage says more than half of the people its panel has approved since then are women; a plaque takes two to three years to go up after that.
A candidate must have been dead for 20 years, “without exception” in the current rules. In practice the wait is longer: the median plaque went up 49 years after its subject died (910 plaques with both years on record). A quarter waited more than 95 years.
71 went up before the 20 years were out. Joseph Chamberlain had one a year after dying, in 1915. From 1971 the rules also allowed anyone born more than a hundred years earlier to be considered, a provision since dropped.
The longest wait for a plaque to one person is Christopher Wren’s: 273 years, from 1723 to 1996.
Open Plaques gives each person a role in free words: poet, statesman, bare-knuckle boxing champion. Grouped into broad fields, writing has 203, and writing, art, music and the stage together account for 470 of 1,010.
Politics, law, faith and learning, grouped here as public life, form the largest field with 210. Science and medicine have 116; architects and engineers 58; soldiers, sailors, explorers and aviators 60; sport 16. 80 fit none of these fields or have no role recorded.
683 of the 1,010 were born in the nineteenth century. Nobody on an official plaque in this record was born after 1961.
The 217 postcode districts with at least 100 postcodes in Greater London, by the number of official plaques on record. Three more official plaques, at Hampton Court, fall in KT8, which is not among them. The last column is the straight-line distance from the district’s median postcode to the nearest official plaque.
The official scheme, now run by English Heritage, has more than 1,000 by its own account; Open Plaques recorded 1,019 of them in December 2025, and this page adds 16 it does not have yet. Counting every scheme, society and private plaque, the page holds 3,942 in Greater London, of which 2,206 are recorded as blue.
Which part of London has the most blue plaques?
W1, with 166 official plaques, then SW1 with 92 and NW3 with 71. 31 of the 120 London postal districts have none on record.
How long after death does someone get a blue plaque?
English Heritage requires at least 20 years. In this record the median is 49 years, and a quarter of plaques went up more than 95 years after the death.
How many blue plaques are for women?
152 of the 1,010 official plaques that honour a person, or 15%, in the record used here. English Heritage gives 15 per cent.
Who decides who gets a blue plaque?
Anyone can propose a name. English Heritage researches each proposal and its Blue Plaques Panel meets three times a year to draw up the shortlist. Around a dozen plaques go up each year.
Is every blue plaque an English Heritage plaque?
No. Borough councils, the Corporation of London, local societies and private owners put up their own, in blue and in other colours. They make up about three quarters of the plaques recorded in Greater London.
Plaques: Open Plaques, United Kingdom data of December 2025, released into the public domain; a plaque is kept if Open Plaques files it under London or its position lies in Greater London (3,942 records, 3,814 with a usable position). The official scheme is the set Open Plaques tags as administered by English Heritage as part of the London-wide scheme, after 63 disputed records were checked one by one. Inscriptions are volunteers’ transcriptions; sex, role and years of birth and death are Open Plaques’ descriptions of each subject, not words on the plaque. The 16 official plaques the record does not have yet come from Wikipedia’s list of English Heritage plaques and are placed by their postcode, with the sex read from the subject’s name; plaques of other schemes put up since December 2025 are missing. Years are Open Plaques’; for some plaques, often ones that were moved, other lists give another year. A plaque’s district is that of the nearest postcode point; district outlines are drawn from postcode points and are not Royal Mail’s boundaries. Distances are straight lines, measured from every postcode except PO boxes and other codes with no place on the ground; ten minutes’ walk is taken as 800 m.
Open Plaques, data downloads and public-domain dedication: openplaques.org
English Heritage, commemorative plaques guidance, 2010 (the centenary provision of 1971): english-heritage.org.uk
Wikipedia, List of English Heritage blue plaques in London (CC BY-SA 4.0), for the plaques the record does not have yet and for checking: en.wikipedia.org