English Heritage


Blue Plaque plates

What would Emmeline Pankhurst have had to say to Kenneth Williams about women's rights? Would Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie have compared notes on murder plots? What would Jimi Hendrix have confessed to Sigmund Freud on the couch?!

Imagining these interactions between people was the starting point for this commission for English Heritage. They approached us to create a range of products to mark and celebrate the 150th Anniversary of the Blue Plaque Scheme. The scheme commemorates famous people with a round blue plaque on the London building where they lived or worked. Being round, a dinner plate seemed the perfect solution! We designed six fine bone-china dinner plates each featuring a leading Londoner. Any idiosyncrasies that appeared in the original hand-made blue plaques were faithfully reproduced in each plate, giving a unique character and sense of integrity to the product and making it a real collector's item.

Our marketing campaign developed a 'Who's coming to dinner?' theme, pitching the plates as being great conversation starters at dinner parties, bringing blue plaques into the home, and history to life. The campaign was very successful, with press features in over twenty titles. Stockists of the plates included Liberty, Museum of London, HandleHendrix museum, The Freud Museum and the National Portrait Gallery and our Blue Plaque plates were finalists in the Association of Cultural Enterprises ' Best Licensed Product Award' in 2017. We were even later commissioned to produce a plate for the President of Kenya!

Also see the delicious launch event at the The Freud Museum!