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As part of the two-week Pride in London Festival, Proximity London has launched Love Lived Here to celebrate leading LGBT+ figures throughout British history.
As of today, key blue plaques around London will be given a temporary rainbow makeover – similar to TfL’s Pride initiative – to acknowledge the individuals who lived here as part of the LGBT+ community, as well as remembering them for their literary, economic or artistic contributions to society.
The Love Lived Here campaign aims to give these influential figures ‘recognition for who they were, not just what they did’. Many of them are praised for their work, but their LGBT+ status has been left out of the history books, because of the times they lived in.
Plaques that have been redecorated include those dedicated to computer scientist Alan Turing, soldier and poet Siegfried Sassoon and choreographer Sir Frederick Ashton.
John Treacy, the executive creative director of the project, said: ‘It’s a simple idea to celebrate who these amazing people really were, beyond just recognising what they did. And a chance to talk about something that, in nearly all these cases, was never talked about at the time.’
The inspiration for this campaign came from another of Proximity London’s projects for Pride, a digitally enhanced animated video of some of the plaques in rainbow colours. The film will be shown during the Pride in London Festival on July 9.
The plaques will be rainbow-coloured until July 8. It’s about time these amazing people get the recognition they deserve – not just for their minds, but for their hearts.
In other news, Pride in London is opening a pop-up store in Soho.