In the modification of the municipal advertising ordinance presented on Tuesday, comrade Juan Parejo reported, the homogenization of the commemorative plaques in the historic center is addressed. In the future they will have to be of uniform dimensions, materials and characteristics. Good. Better late than never. It should be remembered that in London – the city with the most and best designed commemorative plaques – their placement and ordinance began in 1886 at the initiative of the Royal Society of Arts (taking charge of them since 1986 English Heritage), the first being placed in 1887 in the house. Lord Byron’s birthplace at 24 Hollish Street in Cavendish Square. The blue unification of the plates – the elegant circular pattern with white letters on a blue background, slightly modified in 1938 – was decided in 1884, the first being dedicated to Napoleon III in King Street, Saint James.
I confess that I am not objective, but a pathological Anglophile and a devotee of London, the city – as they say in 84 Charing Cross Road– where all dreams fueled by readings and movies are fulfilled when you first visit, the city of which Dr. Johnson said “when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life”. I have lived few happier moments than the first night I spent there with the best possible cicerone, my dear friend Juan Antonio Calvo Valle: we arrived at the Victoria Station at dusk as a backpackers and we kicked the city until dawn to conclude having breakfast in a Covent Garden that was still the fruit and flower market of My Fair Lady. Thanks to the plates – to which the actor Stephen Fry dedicated the guidebook “Lived in London: The Blue Plates and the Stories Behind It- I made a pilgrimage to the houses in which my very dear Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Chaplin, Hitchcock, Lawrence of Arabia, Stevenson, JM Barrie, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen or Joseph Conrad had lived.
In the Sevillian case they should not break their heads with inventions. We have the precedent of the Cervantes ceramic plaques devised by José Gestoso and Santiago Montoto, designed by Gestoso and executed in the Mensaque factory, placed in 1916 to commemorate the third centenary of Cervantes’s death. To be inspired by such a beautiful and Sevillian model to unify the plates would be a success.
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