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OpenPlaques in Liverpool

Liverpool Landscapes was a blog charting new discoveries, news and developments affecting Liverpool's historic environment. It was regularly updated between 2007 and 2016.

Liverpool Landscape has now been retired, and most of the less time-dependent articles moved to Historic Liverpool.

Black plaque marking the location of High Street, Liverpool, one of the original seven streets of the town

A project to map all the blue plaques in Britain has had a recent surge of additions to its Liverpool collection.

OpenPlaques is a project to “collect and open up data about plaques and the people they commemorate”, which involves placing all the information about blue plaques and the people they are dedicated to on an OpenStreetMap map. You can use the OpenPlaques database in your own projects, as it’s all under Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial Share-Alike and Open Data Commons Public Domain Dedication licenses (which means you can generally do anything non-commercial with them as long as you give credit to the source).

The site actually includes all blue and non-blue plaques from projects with similar aims to the original blue plaques scheme from the Royal Society of Arts, now run by English Heritage. I first mentioned them back in February 2010 amongst other web sites for local history.

Since the beginning of October the OpenPlaques Twitter account has been announcing a string of new Liverpool plaques being added to their database.[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/openplaques/status/120948854471393280″]

They were up to 43 by 3rd October, and were already at 84 as of writing this (16th Oct). You can submit your own if it’s not already in their database, so do lend a hand if you can. Liverpool was the first city outside London to be included in the English Heritage blue plaque scheme, which goes to show the city’s importance in national history. Liverpool’s first plaques celebrated the lives of Bessie Braddock, J. A. Brodie, John Lennon, Wilfred Owen, Captain Noel Chevasse and 10 others.

Also while writing this, I’ve noticed that a string of black Liverpool Council plaques are featured on the home page, such as this one marking one of the original seven streets, High Street.

One other thing you can help with is the location of Frankie Vaughan’s plaque. It was unveiled in 2005 at the Museum of Liverpool Life, but no one at the moment can confirm that it’s still there. Has it been moved to the new Museum of Liverpool? Or is it still in the MoLL? Let us know in the comments if you know where it is/was!

Image: High Street South Plaque, by TonyMo22 via Flickr (Creative Commons by-nc-sa)

2 Comments
  1. Not sure if you have this one on your list, but I believe it has a blue plaque on it, I can’t be sure, but you can see it on this picture if you follow the link I have added on the address. My Nan used to live here at 13 Beach Lawn in Waterloo where the much maligned Bruce Ismay, the MD and Chairman of the White Star Line who survived the Titanic once lived between 1865 and 1885. It is also rumoured (according to my late Nan) that it was also famous for lodging Football stars like Jackie Milburn when they visited the City to play Everton & Liverpool FC.

    October 23, 2011
  2. Hi Paul,
    Thanks for pointing this one out. It looks like OpenPlaques don’t have it on their list. There are details of the plaque in a document on the English Heritage website (PDF). Download it and search for the Beach Lawn address.

    As OpenPlaques doesn’t have it listed yet, perhaps you could consider adding it? I’m sure they’d appreciate the input.

    October 24, 2011

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