The lives of others: 150 years of London’s blue plaques

Blue plaques remind us of those who once slept, ate and worked in our buildings. On the 150th anniversary of the first to be unveiled, Martin Scorsese, Mary Beard, Andrew Motion and more share the memorials that mean the most to them

Among the galaxy of lesser known and therefore more surprising names on blue plaques, John Keats shines like his own bright star. This makes him a predictable favourite, but he can never be a dull one. His house in Hampstead, which nowadays looks so pretty and solidly established, was relatively new when he and his friend Charles Brown occupied one half of it (with the Brawne family next door), and frankly poorly built: the walls were only one brick thick. It is, in other words, a vulnerable place. And its most famous inhabitant was vulnerable too: desperately ill for most of the time he lived here, virtually penniless, and heartbrokenly in love with Fanny Brawne while knowing he must soon leave her. The combination of these things makes the house a particularly intense sort of shrine – one that confirms the enduring presence of Keats in our national life, one that brings us close to some of his greatest poetry and makes it feel actual (he wrote Ode to a Nightingale in the garden that still surrounds the house), and one that provides a beautiful little theatre in which the drama and poignancy of his life can be endlessly re-presented.

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