Britain had almost no ballet of its own until the 1920s. A century later it has two of the world's major companies, and the blue plaques record how that happened, which is a genuinely surprising story: it was done largely by a handful of women running studios out of houses in Kensington, Notting Hill and Chelsea, several of them foreign-born, in the space of about twenty years. The plaques also mark the dancers, from the Russian ballerina who kept swans on a pond in Golders Green to the Soviet defector who lived quietly in a Kensington terrace, and they are among the most concentrated in London: you can walk most of the founding history of British ballet in an afternoon.
This is a guide to London's dance and ballet blue plaques, part of the wider blue plaque scheme that records the city's history house by house.
The Women Who Built British Ballet
At 14 The Terrace in Barnes, a plaque records Dame Ninette de Valois (1898-2001), founder of the Royal Ballet, who lived there from 1962. Born Edris Stannus in Ireland, she danced with Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, then came to London with the entirely unreasonable ambition of creating a British national ballet from nothing. She started a school in 1926, attached her dancers to Lilian Baylis's Old Vic and Sadler's Wells theatres, and built the company that became the Royal Ballet, along with the school that feeds it and the touring company that became Birmingham Royal Ballet. She died at 102, having essentially got everything she set out to do.
At 19 Campden Hill Gardens in Kensington, a plaque marks Dame Marie Rambert (1888-1982), founder of Ballet Rambert, and a second plaque on Ladbroke Road records the site as "the birthplace of British ballet", home of the Ballet Club and the Ballet Rambert. Polish-born, Rambert had worked with Nijinsky on The Rite of Spring, and she founded Britain's oldest dance company in 1926, the same year de Valois started her school. Her particular gift was for spotting choreographers: Frederick Ashton, Antony Tudor and others all began with her.
At 152 King's Road in Chelsea, a plaque records Princess Seraphine Astafieva (1876-1934), ballet dancer, who lived and taught there. A former dancer with the Imperial Russian Ballet, she ran a studio in the King's Road through the 1920s that trained an improbable share of the next generation, including Alicia Markova and Anton Dolin.
The teaching institutions are marked too. At Woolborough House, 39 Lonsdale Road, plaques record Edouard Espinosa (1871-1950), maître de ballet, and the founding of the British Ballet Organisation there in 1930. Espinosa was also a co-founder of the Royal Academy of Dance, and the examination systems these bodies built are the reason ballet training in Britain became standardised rather than idiosyncratic.
The Dancers
At Ivy House on North End Road in Golders Green, now St Anthony's School, a plaque records that Anna Pavlova lived there from 1912 to 1931. Pavlova was the most famous dancer in the world, and she chose to base herself in north London for the last twenty years of her life, keeping a pond with swans in the garden, one of which she is said to have used as a model for The Dying Swan. From that house she toured relentlessly, reaching audiences across South America, Asia and Australia who had never seen ballet, and probably did more than anyone to make it a popular art form rather than a court one.
At 108 Frognal in Hampstead, a plaque marks Tamara Karsavina (1885-1978), ballerina, Nijinsky's great partner at the Ballets Russes and the original Firebird. She settled in London after the Russian Revolution, and her presence, teaching and coaching here for decades, is one of the quiet reasons British ballet developed as fast as it did.
At 14 Connaught Square, a plaque records Marie Taglioni (1809-1884), ballet dancer, who lived there in the 1870s. Taglioni belongs to a much earlier era: she was the defining ballerina of the Romantic period, the first great exponent of dancing on pointe, and the woman who made the white tulle skirt the uniform of ballet. She ended up teaching deportment in London.
At 66 Glebe Place in Chelsea, a plaque marks Sir Anton Dolin (1904-1983), ballet dancer, who lived there from 1926 to 1939. Born Patrick Healey-Kay in Sussex, he trained with Astafieva a few streets away, danced with Diaghilev, and with Alicia Markova formed the partnership that gave British audiences their first home-grown ballet stars.
Two plaques mark the most famous names of the modern era. At 118 Long Acre in Covent Garden, a plaque records Dame Margot Fonteyn (1919-1991), prima ballerina assoluta, in a flat a short walk from the Royal Opera House where she spent her career. A second plaque, at 2 Rutland Garden Mews, records Fonteyn alongside the cellist Jacqueline du Pré. And at 27 Victoria Road in Kensington, a plaque marks Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993), who defected from the Soviet Union in Paris in 1961 and, from 1962, formed with Fonteyn the partnership that made ballet front-page news. He was 23 and she was 42, and the pairing was expected to be a mismatch; it lasted fifteen years and is generally regarded as the most celebrated in twentieth-century dance.
The Thread Running Through All of Them
Read the plaques in order and the same organisation keeps appearing. De Valois danced for Diaghilev. Rambert worked for Diaghilev on The Rite of Spring. Karsavina was one of his principal ballerinas. Dolin danced for him. Astafieva had come out of the same Imperial Russian tradition that supplied him.
Serge Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, which operated from 1909 until his death in 1929, never had a permanent home and never performed in Russia, but its London seasons at Covent Garden and the Alhambra were a genuine cultural event, and the company functioned as the training ground for practically everyone who mattered in twentieth-century Western ballet. When it dissolved, its dancers had to go somewhere, and a striking number of them stayed in the city where they had been most enthusiastically received.
That is the mechanism behind the whole collection. British ballet was not built by Britain gradually developing an interest in dance; it was built by a specific company falling apart at a specific moment and depositing its people in west London, where two of them independently decided to start schools within a few months of each other in 1926.
The Choreographers
At 8 Marlborough Street in Chelsea, a plaque records Sir Frederick Ashton (1904-1988), choreographer, who lived there from 1959 to 1984. Ashton was the Royal Ballet's founding choreographer and the person who effectively invented an English style: lyrical, musical, understated, with intricate footwork and a great deal of wit. He created more than a hundred works, and his ballets remain the core of the company's repertoire.
At 14 Lyford Road in Wandsworth, a plaque marks Sir Kenneth MacMillan (1929-1992), choreographer, who succeeded Ashton as the Royal Ballet's director and pulled the art form somewhere much darker. Where Ashton was lyrical, MacMillan made narrative ballets about violence, desire, addiction and mental illness, and the two of them together gave the company a range that few others have.
The Dance Bands
A coda for a different sort of dancing. At The May Fair Hotel on Stratton Street, a plaque records Bert Ambrose (c.1896-1971), dance band leader, who lived and played there from 1927 to 1940, and at 38 Harman Drive in Cricklewood, a plaque marks Henry Hall (1898-1989), dance band leader and broadcaster.
These two are worth including because in the 1920s and 1930s they were far more famous than anyone in the ballet plaques. Dance bands were mass popular entertainment, broadcast nightly by the BBC into millions of homes, and the ballrooms they filled were the centre of British social life. The music halls and theatres that housed them are covered in our guide to the actors' blue plaques, and the impresarios who ran them, including Bernard Delfont at the Prince of Wales Theatre and Richard D'Oyly Carte, are marked across the West End.
Why It Happened Here, and So Fast
The speed is the striking part. In 1920 Britain had no permanent ballet company; by 1946 the Sadler's Wells company was reopening the Royal Opera House with The Sleeping Beauty. Three things converged.
The Russian diaspora. The revolution and the collapse of Diaghilev's Ballets Russes scattered an extraordinary quantity of Russian and Russian-trained talent across Europe, and a lot of it landed in London: Karsavina, Astafieva, Pavlova, and the Ballets Russes dancers who taught here. Britain acquired, essentially by accident, the teaching lineage it had never developed.
Cheap west London property and a permissive attitude to running a studio from a house. Rambert in Notting Hill, Astafieva on the King's Road, de Valois starting out in Roland Gardens. None of this needed a subsidised institution to begin with, and all of it happened in walking distance.
Two theatres willing to take a chance. Lilian Baylis at the Old Vic and Sadler's Wells gave de Valois a stage, an audience and a reason to build a repertoire, which is the thing a company cannot manufacture on its own.
A Dance London Walk
Kensington and Chelsea is the founding quarter and an easy afternoon: Rambert at Campden Hill Gardens and the Ladbroke Road site, Nureyev on Victoria Road, then south to Astafieva on the King's Road, Dolin on Glebe Place and Ashton on Marlborough Street, alongside the wider Chelsea plaques.
North London adds Pavlova at Ivy House in Golders Green, which is the single most atmospheric of these, and Karsavina at Frognal in Hampstead. Covent Garden gives you Fonteyn on Long Acre, a two-minute walk from the Royal Opera House, which is the right place to finish. 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. Very few of these buildings look like anything, which is rather the point: British ballet was built in front rooms and church halls by people who had nowhere else to put it.