London’s Blue Plaques: “double blue” for science & literature | Rebekah Higgitt

This week saw the first Blue Plaque unveiling of 2016, to physicist Patrick Blackett and writer Samuel Beckett. But is this parity for science and literature typical of the 150-year-old scheme?

The first Blue Plaques to be unveiled in the 150th anniversary year of the London-based scheme were a "double blue" in Paultons Square, Chelsea. Most attention will probably be on the writer Samuel Beckett, who lodged at the address in 1934, but the physicist and government advisor Patrick Blackett, who lived at the same address between 1953 and 1969, is also commemorated.

Blackett is undoubtedly the less famous but certainly meets the stiff criteria of significance demanded by the Blue Plaque panel (full disclosure: I am currently a member of the panel but was not at the time that these plaques were decided). He was, after all, a Nobel Prize laureate - awarded in 1948 "for his development of the Wilson cloud chamber method, and his discoveries therewith in the fields of nuclear physics and cosmic radiation" - and a President of the Royal Society.