An unreasonable share of the books read to children in the English-speaking world was written within a few miles of Kensington Gardens. Peter Pan was invented by a man who walked his dog there. Winnie-the-Pooh was written in Chelsea and drawn in Regent's Park. The Wind in the Willows was begun as bedtime stories in a house on Phillimore Place. Mary Poppins was written in a terraced house on Smith Street, and The Secret Garden in a flat on Portland Place. London's blue plaques mark nearly all of them, usually on perfectly ordinary front doors, which is a peculiar and rather lovely thing to walk past.
This is a guide to the blue plaques for children's authors and illustrators, part of the wider blue plaque scheme that records the city's history house by house, and a companion to our guide to the writers' blue plaques, which covers the adult literary city.
The Books Everyone Knows
At 100 Bayswater Road, a plaque records Sir J. M. Barrie (1860-1937), novelist and dramatist, who lived there in the years he was inventing Peter Pan. The house backs onto Kensington Gardens, where Barrie walked his St Bernard and met the Llewelyn Davies boys whose games became the play. A second plaque, on Bernard Street, names him as the creator of Peter Pan. He later gave the copyright to Great Ormond Street Hospital, which still benefits from it.
At 13 Mallord Street in Chelsea, a plaque marks A. A. Milne (1882-1956), who wrote the four Pooh books there in the 1920s, drawing on his son Christopher Robin's nursery toys. The illustrator who made them permanent is marked separately: at 10 Kent Terrace, Regent's Park, a plaque records E. H. Shepard (1879-1976), painter and illustrator, whose line drawings are so completely fused with the text that most readers cannot picture Pooh any other way. Two plaques, two men, one bear, about four miles apart.
At 16 Phillimore Place in Kensington, a plaque records Kenneth Grahame (1859-1932), named on it as the author of The Wind in the Willows. He lived there while working as Secretary of the Bank of England, telling the Toad stories to his son Alastair at bedtime and later writing them down in letters when the boy was away.
At 50 Smith Street in Chelsea, a plaque marks P. L. Travers (1899-1996), author of Mary Poppins, who lived and worked there from 1946 to 1962. And at 63 Portland Place, a plaque records Frances Hodgson Burnett (1849-1924), who wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy, A Little Princess, and The Secret Garden.
At 1 Gunter Grove in Chelsea, a plaque marks Arthur Ransome (1884-1967), author of Swallows and Amazons, who lived there in 1904 and 1905 as a young man, long before the Lake District books. Ransome's earlier career is one of the odder ones in this collection: he was a foreign correspondent in Russia during the revolution, knew Lenin and Trotsky, and married Trotsky's secretary.
At Bousfield Primary School in South Kensington, a plaque records that Beatrix Potter lived in a house on the site from 1866 to 1913. She spent nearly fifty years in that London house, largely confined by her family, keeping mice, rabbits and a hedgehog in the schoolroom, drawing them obsessively, and publishing The Tale of Peter Rabbit at thirty-six. The house is gone; the school stands where it was.
Two more names complete the group. At 207 Hook Road in Chessington, a plaque marks Enid Blyton (1897-1968), children's writer, who lived there in the early 1920s while she was still a teacher and had published almost nothing. And at 56 Old Church Street in Chelsea, a plaque records Charles Kingsley (1819-1875), whose The Water-Babies was one of the first English children's novels to be genuinely strange.
The Golden Age, and Its Cost
The dates on these plaques cluster tightly, and the clustering is the story. The Tale of Peter Rabbit appeared in 1902, Peter Pan reached the stage in 1904, The Wind in the Willows was published in 1908, and The Secret Garden in 1911. Within a single decade, and largely within a few square miles of west London, children's literature stopped being mainly instructive and became mainly imaginative.
What changed was partly technical and partly cultural. Colour printing had become cheap enough for beautiful books to reach ordinary households, and a Victorian tradition of improving tales written to make children better had given way to writing that simply took children's inner lives seriously. The results have never really been displaced: more than a century later, these are still among the most widely read books in the language.
It is worth noting that the plaques record happy books and not always happy lives. Christopher Robin Milne spent much of his adulthood uncomfortable with having been made a character, and wrote candidly about the cost of it. P. L. Travers disliked what was done to Mary Poppins on screen and said so for the rest of her life. Beatrix Potter produced her work during decades of near-confinement in the South Kensington house the plaque marks, and only really got a life of her own once the books had paid for a farm in the Lake District. The blue discs mark the addresses; they do not say much about what went on behind the doors.
The Great Victorian Illustrators
Children's books became beautiful objects in the second half of the nineteenth century, and three London plaques mark the people responsible.
At 46 Great Russell Street, a plaque records Randolph Caldecott (1846-1886), artist and book illustrator, whose picture books introduced the idea that the pictures could tell part of the story rather than merely decorate it. At Greenaway House, 39 Frognal in Hampstead, a plaque marks Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), artist, whose illustrations of children in high-waisted smocks and bonnets were so popular that they changed how actual children were dressed. And at 13 Holland Street, a plaque records Walter Crane (1845-1915), artist, the third of the trio and the most political, a committed socialist who worked closely with William Morris.
The connection between the three is worth knowing: all of them worked with the engraver and colour printer Edmund Evans, whose technical skill made mass-produced colour picture books possible at a price ordinary families could pay. Two of the most prestigious awards in children's illustration, the Caldecott Medal in America and the Kate Greenaway Medal in Britain, are named after members of that group.
Rackham, Ardizzone and the Twentieth Century
At 16 Chalcot Gardens in Belsize Park, a plaque records Arthur Rackham (1867-1939), illustrator, and a second, at 27 Albert Square in Lambeth, marks him as artist and illustrator. Rackham's sinuous, faintly sinister ink-and-watercolour work defined the illustrated gift book of the Edwardian period, and his fairy tales still set the visual template for what a fairy tale is supposed to look like.
At 130 Elgin Avenue in Maida Vale, a plaque marks Edward Ardizzone (1900-1979), artist and illustrator, creator of the Little Tim books and one of the great pen-and-ink draughtsmen of the century, who was also an official war artist. At 16 Church Road, Shortlands, a plaque records Charles Keeping (1924-1988), illustrator, whose work was darker and more experimental than most children's publishing of the time allowed.
Two much-loved popular illustrators are here too. At 58 Cranes Park in Surbiton, a plaque marks Alfred Bestall (1892-1986), illustrator of Rupert Bear, who drew and largely wrote the Rupert annuals for thirty years. And at 75 Moss Lane in Pinner, a plaque records W. Heath Robinson (1872-1944), illustrator and comic artist, whose absurd, string-and-pulley contraptions put his name into the language as a description of any improvised, over-complicated machine.
Finally, at 239 Ladbroke Grove, a plaque marks Hablot Knight Browne (1815-1882), who under the name "Phiz" illustrated ten of Dickens's novels, including David Copperfield and Bleak House. Not children's books, strictly, but the same trade and the same era, and he appears in the wider story told in our guide to Charles Dickens's London.
Why So Much of It Happened Here
Two reasons, one commercial and one accidental.
The commercial one is that London was the centre of English-language publishing, and children's books were a business before they were an art. The engravers, colour printers, and publishers who could make an illustrated book were concentrated in the same few streets as the writers, which is why the illustrators cluster around Bloomsbury and Kensington in the same way the authors do. Our guide to the printing and publishing plaques covers the trade that made it possible.
The accidental reason is Kensington Gardens. An improbable number of these books came out of the same square mile of west London, and several of them came out of that particular park: Barrie meeting the Llewelyn Davies boys there, Potter drawing animals a short walk away, Grahame writing on Phillimore Place, Travers in Chelsea, Burnett on Portland Place. It is not that the park was magical. It is that a certain kind of comfortable, literary, slightly melancholy west London household produced a certain kind of book, over and over, for about fifty years.
A Children's Books Walk
Kensington and Chelsea is the obvious route and an easy afternoon: start at Barrie on Bayswater Road, walk through Kensington Gardens, pick up Grahame at Phillimore Place and Crane on Holland Street, then south to Milne on Mallord Street, Travers on Smith Street, Ransome on Gunter Grove, and Kingsley on Old Church Street, alongside the wider Chelsea plaques. Beatrix Potter's site at Bousfield School is on the way.
For the illustrators, north London gives you Rackham in Belsize Park, Greenaway in Hampstead, Shepard at Regent's Park, and Ardizzone in Maida Vale, near the plaques in our guide to Hampstead. 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. These are the plaques most likely to make somebody stop in the street, because almost everyone has read at least one of these books, usually before they could read anything else.