Plaques on Walls

Everywhere you go in London, there are plaques on walls, reminding you of the many people of historical significance who have lived and worked in this city. Here are just a few that I noticed. As a reader, art-lover, history lover, I love to see the plaques, they bring the city so much more to life for me.

T.S Eliot! His words are in my head.

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.

The Pre Raphaelite Brotherhood, poets, artists, dreamers, oh my, all those beautiful people met here.

John Nash, Architect whose vision created so much of London's classical buildings.

George Bernard Shaw, and then, later, Virginia Woolf.

 

Francisco De Miranda, whose vision saw Latin America gain its freedom and nationhood, breaking away from Spanish colonial rule.

Simon Bolivar, the man who led the movement founded on Miranda's views and the revolution in Venezuela, stayed here.

"The Junta sent a delegation to Great Britain to get British recognition and aid. This delegation, which included future Venezuelan notables Simón Bolívar and Andrés Bello, met with and persuaded Miranda to return to his native land. There he agitated for the provisional government to declare independence."

I picture just a few of those plaques. They're everywhere.