Who Gets a Blue Plaque? Gender, Occupation and Place in Britain's Commemorative Plaques

Commemorative plaques are small public verdicts on who mattered and where they lived. I use open data to ask who Britain has remembered on its walls, and where. I parse the wikitext of Wikipedia's lists of English Heritage blue plaques in London, which give the year each plaque went up, and obtain 1,037 plaques naming 1,081 people; I add the 5,428 people in Wikidata with an Open Plaques subject identifier, and 6,476 plaques mapped in OpenStreetMap across the United Kingdom. Gender is taken from Wikidata for 83% of the London plaque people and inferred from titles and first names for the rest. Women are 16% of the people on London's official plaques. The share was 8% under the London County Council (1901 to 1964) and 10% under the Greater London Council (1965 to 1985), rose to 20% in the 2010s and reached 54% among the 72 people honoured since 2020. Writers are the largest occupation group (21%), but their share and that of politicians has fallen while stage, screen, music and sport have grown. Among all Open Plaques people in Wikidata, 15% are women. London has 18.8 mapped plaques per 100,000 residents against 8.2 in the rest of England and Wales, yet ranks only 12th among large built-up areas, behind spa, cathedral, university and seaside towns. Volunteer coverage and inferred gender add error, but the main finding is robust: the walls have remembered men, and the balance has shifted only very recently. Interactive version: https://tristan-hotham.github.io/blue-plaques/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/blue-plaques. Blog post: https://blog.tristanhotham.com/2026/10/27/blue-plaques/.