London icons to be honoured with blue plaques to mark 150 years anniversary

Honour: a blue plaque will adorn Freddie Mercury's former home
Fox Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty
Hannah Al-Othman25 February 2016

Queen's flamboyant front-man Freddie Mercury is to be recognised with a blue plaque at his former London home.

The singer joins fellow late stars former England footballer Bobby Moore, comedian Tommy Cooper and Hollywood star Ava Gardner, who are all getting new memorials in the capital to mark the 150th anniversary of the English Heritage scheme.

Irish Nobel Prize-winning playwright Samuel Beckett, cookery writer Elizabeth David, the ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn and Laurie Cunningham, one of the first black footballers to play for England, will also get plaques this year.

Rock star Mercury, who died in 1991 after a battle with Aids, will be honoured at his former house in Feltham, in south west London, where he moved with his family in 1964.

The plaque for Moore, the heroic captain of England's 1966 World Cup winning team, will be the first in the borough of Barking and Dagenham, marking the house where he lived at the time of his international debut in 1962.

Gardner, whose glittering career also included three high-profile marriages to Mickey Rooney, musician Artie Shaw and Frank Sinatra, will have her memorial at her former Knightsbridge flat.

Meanwhile Cunningham, who became the first British player to transfer to Real Madrid, will be honoured with a plaque at the home where he used to live in Finsbury Park.

A plaque will also adorn the house in Chelsea where author Beckett was staying in 1934 when his first full length work, short stories called More Pricks Than Kicks, was published.

Fez-wearing funny man Cooper will be remembered at his former home in Chiswick, where he lived with his wife and two children from 1955 until his death in 1984.

And the first plaque commemorating a cookery writer will be installed in Chelsea in memory of David, who was instrumental in introducing post-war England to Mediterranean food.

A plaque for Fonteyn will be installed outside her former flat in Covent Garden where she lived during some of some of her career-defining roles as prima ballerina of Sadler's Wells Ballet, including Cinderella and Sylvia.

English Heritage said more than 900 memorials linking famous people to the buildings in which they lived and worked had been installed since the programme was established in 1866.

Professor Ronald Hutton, chairman of English Heritage's blue plaques panel, said: "Since 1866, these modest but distinctive blue roundels have reminded us of the people and places that made history.

"This year we will celebrate stars of the silver screen and stage, a much loved comedian, sporting legends, and one of the greatest writers of modern times. It's a roll-call that underlines the wide range of talent who over the centuries have made London their home."

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