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Jean Muir, dressmaker and fashion designer, celebrated with English Heritage Blue Plaque

A blue plaque honouring Jean Muir, the celebrated dressmaker and fashion designer, has been unveiled by her house model, friend and loyal customer, Joanna Lumley.

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Self-taught Victorian physicist celebrated with English Heritage blue plaque

The physicist, mathematician and electrical engineer, Oliver Heaviside, has been commemorated with a blue plaque, English Heritage announced today (22 April 2022). Heaviside’s biographer, Paul Nahin, once noted that his work on how to make a decent telephone cable plays a vastly greater role in our everyday lives than does the work of Einstein. The plaque marks the terrace house on Camden Street that Heaviside once described as “heaven in comparison” to his family’s previous house. It was here that the budding Victorian scientist continued with his self-education after leaving school at 16 and where he later worked on his ground-breaking interpretation of James Clerk Maxwell’s Treatise on Electricity and Magnetism, bridging the gulf between the theory of telecommunciations and its practice.

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Summer Solstice at Stonehenge 2022

English Heritage is inviting people to watch Summer Solstice at Stonehenge from home this year as the sunset and sunrise is live streamed. Visitors to the site are asked to respect the stones and think green.

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Colourful art installation at Hadrian’s Wall puts a new spin on a Roman gatehouse

In celebration of Hadrian’s Wall’s 1900th anniversary, English Heritage has installed a contemporary and colourful take on the original Roman gatehouse at Housesteads Roman Fort – one of the Wall’s best preserved and most important sites.

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English Heritage’s historic memorials and Black Lives Matter

Our statement on the statues within our care and diverse representation within the London Blue Plaques Scheme

Property

Rollright Stones

Traditionally a monarch and his courtiers petrified by a witch, the Rollright Stones consist of three groups: the King's Men stone circle; the Whispering Knights burial chamber; and the single King Stone. They span nearly 2,000 years of Neolithic and Bronze Age development.

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Make jousting an Olympic sport

As Team GB heads to Rio, English Heritage calls for jousting to be recognised as an Olympic sport

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Hadrian’s Wall Roman Fort given to the nation

A Roman fort on Hadrian’s Wall has joined Stonehenge, Dover Castle and Kenwood House in the National Heritage Collection following a generous gift by a Northumberland landowner. Now in the care of English Heritage, the Roman fort’s future is secure and its stories will soon be shared with visitors to the wall.

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18th Century Anti-Slavery Campaigner awarded English Heritage blue plaque

The anti-slavery campaigner Ottobah Cugoano has been honoured with an English Heritage blue plaque. The plaque marks Schomberg House at 80–82 Pall Mall, where Cugoano, a former slave himself, was employed as a servant by artists Richard and Maria Cosway. It was while living here in the 1780s that Cugoano wrote the book, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Humbly Submitted to the Inhabitants of Great-Britain, one of the first black-authored anti-slavery books to be published in Britain, and – of its era – the most radical in its arguments.

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Second World War heroine honoured with blue plaque

English Heritage will today (28 August) unveil a blue plaque to the Second World War spy, Noor Inayat Khan. The new plaque will mark the house on Taviton Street in Bloomsbury that was her family home when she left for Nazi-occupied France in 1943 as an undercover radio operator. She was killed at Dachau concentration camp in 1944, having revealed nothing to her captors, not even her real name.