Most people walk past a building without wondering who drew it. London's blue plaques quietly answer the question, because the architects who shaped the city also lived in it, and their houses are marked. Walk with an eye for the blue discs and you pass the home of the man who rebuilt London after the Great Fire, the terrace that a young John Nash designed as his very first commission, the house of the architect of the Houses of Parliament, and the flat of the man who gave Britain the red telephone box. The architects' blue plaques in London form a hidden index to the skyline: for almost every landmark you can name, there is a front door somewhere in the city with a blue plaque beside it.
This is a guide to the blue plaques that mark London's architects, from the Baroque masters through the Victorian giants to the modernists, part of the wider blue plaque scheme that records the city's history house by house.
The Baroque and Georgian Masters
The story begins with the greatest name of all. At The Old Court House on Hampton Court Green, a plaque records Sir Christopher Wren (1632-1723), the astronomer turned architect who rebuilt fifty-one City churches and St Paul's Cathedral after the Great Fire, and who spent his last years in this modest house beside the palace he had worked on. Nearby in Greenwich, on Maze Hill, a plaque marks Sir John Vanbrugh (1664-1726), the architect of Blenheim Palace and Castle Howard who was also a successful playwright, and who designed and lived in the castellated house the plaque commemorates.
The Georgian age brought the classical rule-makers. At 76 Brook Street in Mayfair a plaque records Colen Campbell (1676-1729), author of Vitruvius Britannicus, the book that launched the Palladian revival in Britain, and at 91 Gower Street in Bloomsbury a plaque marks George Dance the Younger (1741-1825), architect of Newgate Prison and a founder member of the Royal Academy. At 1-3 Robert Street in the Adelphi, a plaque records the eminent residents of the street built by Robert Adam and his brothers, the most fashionable designers of Georgian Britain, whose name is still attached to a whole style of interior.
One great Georgian is missing from the blue plaques, and it is worth saying so plainly: Sir John Soane has no blue plaque in London, because his house is itself the memorial. He left it to the nation exactly as he arranged it, and it survives as the extraordinary Sir John Soane's Museum on Lincoln's Inn Fields, which is arguably a better commemoration than any plaque could be.
John Nash and the Making of Regency London
No architect shaped the look of central London more than John Nash (1752-1835), and unusually he is marked twice, in the same street. At 66 Great Russell Street in Bloomsbury a plaque records that he designed the terrace and lived there, and a few doors along at 67-70 Great Russell Street another plaque marks the terrace as the first work of his career. It is a rare thing to be able to stand in front of an architect's debut and his home on the same pavement, and it is a fitting place to start on a man who went on to lay out Regent Street, Regent's Park and its terraces, remodel Buckingham Palace, and give London its most theatrical stretch of townscape.
The Regency generation around him is marked across the West End. At 81 Charlotte Street a plaque records Sir Robert Smirke (1781-1867), architect of the British Museum's great Greek Revival front, and at 39 Brook Street a plaque marks Sir Jeffry Wyatville (1766-1840), who remodelled Windsor Castle into the silhouette we recognise today. At 13 Chester Terrace, on one of Nash's own Regent's Park terraces, a plaque records C. R. Cockerell (1788-1863), architect and antiquary, and at 17 Savile Row a plaque marks George Basevi (1794-1845), designer of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge and much of Belgravia's finest housing.
The Victorian Giants
The Victorians built on a scale that still defines central London, and their plaques are correspondingly grand in association. At The Elms, Clapham Common North Side, a plaque records Sir Charles Barry (1795-1860), who lived and died there, and who won the competition to build the new Houses of Parliament after the fire of 1834. In one of the neatest coincidences in the whole scheme, his son Sir John Wolfe Barry (1836-1918) is marked at Delahay House, 15 Chelsea Embankment, and he designed Tower Bridge. Between father and son, one family produced two of the most photographed structures in Britain.
The Gothic Revival fills much of the rest. At 61 New Cavendish Street a plaque records Alfred Waterhouse (1830-1905), architect of the Natural History Museum and Manchester Town Hall. At 14 Cavendish Place a plaque marks George Edmund Street (1824-1881), who built the Royal Courts of Justice on the Strand, and at 13 Mansfield Street a single plaque records two architects in succession, John Loughborough Pearson (1817-1897), architect of Truro Cathedral, and later Sir Edwin Lutyens (1869-1944), the greatest British architect of the early twentieth century. At 42 Bedford Square a plaque marks William Butterfield (1814-1900), the fierce Gothic originality behind All Saints Margaret Street, and at 109 Harley Street one records George Frederick Bodley (1827-1907). At 43 Old Town, Clapham, a plaque marks John Francis Bentley (1839-1902), architect of the great Byzantine bulk of Westminster Cathedral, and at 11 Hanover Terrace one records Anthony Salvin (1799-1881), the castle specialist who restored the Tower of London.
Two Victorians are marked for reasons beyond their buildings. At 27 Sumner Place in Kensington a plaque records Joseph Aloysius Hansom (1803-1882), architect, founder editor of The Builder, and inventor of the Hansom cab, the vehicle that defined Victorian London's streets. And at 24 Alexander Square a plaque marks George Godwin (1813-1888), described on it as architect, journalist and social reformer, who used his editorship of The Builder to campaign against the slums.
Arts and Crafts and the Domestic Revolution
The late nineteenth century turned away from grand public building towards the house, and this is where British architecture had its widest influence abroad. On Red House Lane in Bexleyheath, a plaque records the Red House, built in 1859-60 by Philip Webb for William Morris, the building usually treated as the starting gun of the Arts and Crafts movement. At 6 Ellerdale Road in Hampstead, a plaque marks Richard Norman Shaw (1831-1912), who designed the house, lived, worked and died in it, and whose free, red-brick manner was copied across the suburbs of the English-speaking world. Shaw is marked a second time at Grim's Dyke, Harrow Weald, the house he designed for the painter Frederick Goodall that later became the home of W. S. Gilbert.
The movement's teachers and theorists are here too. William Richard Lethaby (1857-1931) is marked twice, at 20 Calthorpe Street where he lived and at the Central School of Arts and Crafts on Southampton Row, where he was the first principal. At 6 Carlton Hill in St John's Wood a plaque records C. F. A. Voysey (1857-1941), whose long, low white houses and pattern designs are among the most recognisable English work of the period. At 43 Glebe Place in Chelsea, a plaque marks Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Margaret Macdonald, the Glasgow partnership who worked from the building during their London years. And at Wildwood Terrace in Hampstead a plaque records Sir Raymond Unwin, the architect and town planner who laid out Hampstead Garden Suburb and effectively invented the English garden suburb.
The Twentieth Century
Modern London has its plaques too. At Chester House, Clarendon Place, a plaque records Sir Giles Gilbert Scott (1880-1960), who designed the house and lived in it for thirty-four years, and whose work ranges from Liverpool Cathedral and Battersea Power Station to the red telephone box, probably the most reproduced piece of British design ever made. At 18 Yeoman's Row in Knightsbridge a plaque marks Wells Coates (1895-1958), the modernist behind the Isokon building in Hampstead, and at Gates House, Wyldes Close one records Thomas Smith Tait (1882-1954), designer of the pylons of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
At 1 Canonbury Place in Islington a plaque marks Sir Basil Spence (1907-1976), architect of the rebuilt Coventry Cathedral, who lived and worked there, and on Alfred Place a plaque records Cedric Price (1934-2003), the visionary who worked there for nearly forty years and whose unbuilt Fun Palace influenced a generation. It is a good reminder that architectural influence is not measured only in completed buildings.
The Builders, the Engineers, and the Theatre Architects
Architecture is only half the story of how a city gets built, and London's plaques mark the others. At 3 Lyall Street a plaque records Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855), described simply as Master Builder, the contractor who built much of Belgravia and Pimlico and effectively industrialised London housebuilding. At King's Cross station, 13-21 Euston Road, a plaque marks his brother Lewis Cubitt (1799-1883) as the architect of the station, opened in 1852 and still, after every rebuilding around it, the finest railway façade in London.
The great engineers sit alongside them. At 17 Hamilton Terrace in St John's Wood a plaque records Sir Joseph Bazalgette (1819-1891), the civil engineer whose sewer system ended the cholera epidemics and whose embankments reshaped the Thames, and whose work is covered further in our guide to the scientists' blue plaques, alongside Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
And then there is the man who built the places London went to enjoy itself. Frank Matcham (1854-1920), the greatest theatre architect Britain has produced, is marked at his home at 10 Haslemere Road in Hornsey and on two of his theatres, the Hippodrome on Cranbourne Street and the Shepherd's Bush Empire. Matcham designed or remodelled around eighty theatres, and the plush, gilded interiors that people still call "a proper theatre" are very largely his invention.
The Historians Who Taught London to Look
Two plaques mark not architects but the men who taught the country to notice architecture, and they are almost neighbours. At 2 Wildwood Terrace in Hampstead a plaque records Sir Nikolaus Pevsner (1902-1983), the architectural historian whose Buildings of England series described, county by county, almost every building of note in the country, and who lived in the house from 1936 until his death. At 1 Eton Villas in Chalk Farm a plaque marks Sir John Summerson (1904-1992), curator of Soane's museum and author of Georgian London, the book that explained how the city's squares and terraces came to be.
London's landscape designers are marked as well. Lancelot "Capability" Brown (1716-1783) has plaques at Wilderness House, Hampton Court Palace, where he lived as Master Gardener, and on Church Road, Wimbledon, and at 19 Grove Terrace a plaque records Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900-1996), the landscape architect who designed the Kennedy Memorial at Runnymede.
Why London Is Full of Architects' Plaques
The density of architects' plaques is not an accident. For three centuries London was both the largest building site in the world and the place where architectural careers were made: the Royal Academy schools, the professional institutes, the competitions for public buildings, and the clients with money were all here. An architect needed to be in London to win the work, and once successful they built or chose houses that displayed their own taste, which is why so many of these plaques mark buildings the architect designed for himself. Wren beside Hampton Court, Nash on his own terrace, Norman Shaw in his own Hampstead house, Giles Gilbert Scott in the house he drew for his family: the plaque and the building are often the same statement.
There is also a pleasing circularity to walking the city this way. The architects clustered in the streets they and their contemporaries had built, in Marylebone, Bloomsbury, Mayfair, and Hampstead, so a walk between their homes is also a walk through their work. You are, quite literally, following the people who designed the pavement you are standing on.
An Architectural London Walk
The plaques cluster helpfully. Marylebone is the densest quarter, with Waterhouse on New Cavendish Street, Street on Cavendish Place, Pearson and Lutyens sharing Mansfield Street, and Bodley on Harley Street, all within a short walk and all covered further in our guide to Marylebone's blue plaques. Bloomsbury gives you both Nash plaques on Great Russell Street, Butterfield on Bedford Square, and Dance on Gower Street, alongside the wider Bloomsbury plaques. Mayfair adds Colen Campbell and Wyatville on Brook Street and Basevi on Savile Row, part of the story in our guide to Mayfair's blue plaques, and Hampstead gathers Norman Shaw, Unwin, and Pevsner in the northern hills.
Further out, the pilgrimages are worth the journey: Wren at Hampton Court, Vanbrugh at Greenwich, and the Red House at Bexleyheath, the birthplace of Arts and Crafts. If you want to find these plaques as you walk, and keep a record of the ones you have visited, Legacy maps every blue plaque in London, turning a day of exploring into a collection you build over time. The architects' plaques are the best possible argument for looking up as you walk: the city was drawn by people, and most of them lived just around the corner from the thing they drew.