BLUE PLAQUES BY

KIM LESLIE

Felpham Parish Council completed its Platinum Heritage Blue Plaque Trail last month with its latest plaque to Concorde’s first female pilot – and champion yachtswoman – Barbara Harmer. She flew into aviation history as senior officer on BA’s Concorde flight from London Heathrow to New York in March 1993. What stories these plaques tell in so few words, in their own simple, modest way.

Heritage is made up of so many strands: architecture, art, landscapes, earthworks, inventions, archives. The country is littered with traces of its past. Blue plaques add people to the mix, and – most significantly – in easily-digestible form. Economically worded, no doubt the shortest biographies ever, the rest is up to us and our imagination if we want to find out more. Who can’t be moved by just the few lines by The Lobster Pot about Felpham’s highly-decorated explorer, Ernest Joyce, and his expeditions to Antarctica with Shackleton and Scott? Just a few lines, but surely inspiration into a whole new trail of discovery into the perils of his dangerous days. There are just two memorials to Joyce: one here in Felpham and the other by the Antarctica mountain named in his honour, Mount Joyce.

Blue plaques once played a large part in my own heritage work for West Sussex County Council where I was responsible for its Blue Plaque Scheme. Thirty-eight plaques in all were erected around the county between 1992 and 2010, to people like Shelley the poet; Anna Sewell of Black Beauty fame; E.H. Shepard who drew all the original Winnie the Pooh and Christopher Robin characters for A.A. Milne’s books; Eric Coates the musician whose Sleepy Lagoon introduces Desert Island Discs inspired by the view, not from the shores of a palm-fringed desert island, but from Selsey over the bay to Bognor! There’s a blue plaque to that effect on Selsey’s East Beach. Great talent has always been attracted to Sussex.

I’m frequently asked who can put up blue plaques. The short answer is anyone, but there are two legal requirements. Firstly, permission must be given from the owner of the property, an obvious point when it’s on a building, but occasionally they are on plinths beside public rights of way (as is one commemorating RAF Selsey by a field at Church Norton). Ownership of the land must be investigated. Secondly, planning permission from the relevant district council is necessary if the plaque is to be attached to a listed building or is in a conservation area. Otherwise anybody, whether a private individual or local organisation, is completely free to put up a blue plaque, commemorating whomsoever they wish. There’s even one in Haywards Heath to a pigeon who flew vital missions with secret messages from behind enemy lines in the Second World War.