The social reformer, environmental improver and mayor of Bermondsey, Ada Salter, has been commemorated with a blue plaque, English Heritage announced today (8 March). The plaque will mark 149 Lower Road in Rotherhithe, the Women’s House of the Bermondsey Settlement where Ada lived in the late 1890s. It was from here, in her early career, that she undertook social work across what was to become the Metropolitan Borough of Bermondsey – then a deprived dockside area of south London, upon which she would make such a profound impact.

The building stands just across the road from Southwark Park, where some 15,000 striking women attended a demonstration in the park during the ‘Bermondsey uprising’ in 1911; as honorary treasurer of the Women’s Labour League, Ada Salter organised strike relief – a daily meal for 50,000 strikers and their families – allowing them to stay out and win substantial gains before returning to work.

Ada Salter became Mayor of Bermondsey in 1922 – the first female mayor of a London borough and the first Labour woman to be elected as a mayor in Britain. She also served as a Bermondsey borough councillor and represented Bermondsey West on the London County Council. By the end of the 1930s, the borough boasted a public health service, palatial baths and wash-houses, an ambitious slum-clearance and housing programme, playgrounds and had seen the planting of thousands of trees. Working in partnership with her husband, Dr Alfred Salter, this revolution was in no small part due to the work of Ada Salter. She never wavered in her belief that an attractive urban environment with green spaces was vital to the health and welfare of the people, and should be accessible to all.

Actor and Patron of the Salter Centenary, Dame Judi Dench, said: “As a champion of environmentalism and the welfare of others, Ada was a force to be reckoned with. We have so much to thank her for and so much that we can still learn from her. I’m delighted to help bring this heroic woman into the public eye.”

English Heritage’s Rebecca Preston said: “Ada Salter’s accomplishments were many, and each one highly significant: from her early proposal for a green belt around London, which with her help went on to become law in 1938 whilst she was vice-chair of the London County Council Parks Committee, to the ambitious housing programme which aimed to make Bermondsey a garden city, and the maternity and child-welfare services which were the foundation of the borough’s municipal health service formed under her watch.

“She believed that gardens and playgrounds were integral to a total public welfare programme. Her open spaces were not just green but ablaze with colour: not least from new strains of hardy dahlia – the ‘Bermondsey Gem’ and the ‘Rotherhithe Gem’ – grown by the borough gardeners in their hundreds.”

Other female firsts celebrated by English Heritage’s London Blue Plaques Scheme include Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman to qualify as a doctor in Britain, Lilian Lyndsay, the first woman to qualify as a dentist in Britain, and Fanny Wilkinson, who was most probably Britain’s first professional landscape gardener and the designer of many London open spaces.

The English Heritage London Blue Plaques Scheme is generously supported by members of the public.