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One of the important things about coming back after being away is that small things spring out in new ways. As a London resident it is easy to stop noticing the blue plaques. But today the Alfred Hitchcock one on the street where I live looked different, because I have been living for a while in a place that has no blue plaques indicating to passers-by name, life-span and main activity of a building’s past resident. It looked different because I noticed it again for the first time in a while and reflected on this marvellous urban ritual of recording residences, of the homage the city can make to some of its people.
The blue plaque has chance encounter written all over it, unless of course one is on a tour of such items. Of interest to us here is the way it can yield up a treasure of information, in a small concentrated and yet perversely un-reductive way, about the person named on the plaque, and about the personal interest of said passer-by that would make them notice or not a specific name. Stop or not, read or not. And also about how the fact that a given person lived for a while in a specific place lends a specific aura to this place. That this history of habitation can be traced back, and is worthy of record.
There is something about this cultural treasure hunt that is powerful in this random encounter of the hunter or flaneur’s interests and the city holding up a direction panel into personal associations (what does Hitchcock make you think of, if you chance on this name without being previously primed? Is this thought useful in any way?). Anecdotal associations, into which one can build one’s own imaginings. Something of the pilgrimage, of being there too, albeit later. In the same vein, when I used to visit the round reading room of the British Library on a daily basis (in the British Museum days) it never ceased to amaze me how often someone would approach the information desk while I was standing by waiting for books to emerge from the stacks and ask what specific seat number Marx had a habit of using. Which particular stretch of blue leather upholstery his favoured. Something about the mystery of place and its lasting influence on actions and ideas.
If we were to transport the blue plaque approach into organisations, signposting key events, people, ideas, happenings, it may only be the chance encounter angle that would make sure it was not a propaganda exercise. And a balance between taxidermy and live, vibrant record. Imagine a cube with a plaque saying that so and so developed strategy slide deck X here in 2008. But then imagine this as transportable scribbles of shared stories, the way the interior glass walls at the Google campus in Manhattan are set up to be written on, and something altogether more spontaneous about self-selected record may emerge. About telling our own stories and stepping into a more personal view of what is worthy of celebration and remembrance in a specific community, rather than in the anonymous big city.
