On Sun, 17 Aug 2008, John Rowland wrote:

I think they would be a lot more useful if they had little flags hanging
above them, giving an indication of which people might be interested in
them. For instance, not many Londoners would be interested in a plaque
about how the founder of Bolivia once lived in this house,

Well they should be, the ignorant oiks. That's history!

whereas Bolivian tourists would probably like to have it drawn to their
attention that of all the blue plaques in London, this is the one which
is of interest to them, so a little flagpole with a Bolivian flag above
the blue plaque would help everyone. I don't think it would spoil
conservation areas either.

I think that's quite a nice idea. You might want to subdivide further than
by country, though - if, say, 90% of plaques are about British people
(does that sounds plausible? where's that Jelf when you need him? JELF!),
then the national flag isn't providing a lot of information about those
ones. Maybe we could have further flags which indicate that the person was
an artist, engineer, politician, etc, or what century they were from.
Perhaps the maritime signal flags could be used for this; letters for
classifications, and numeral pennants for date (if the relevant year is
1xyy, fly pennant x; fly 0 for years before 1000, and, oh i don't know,
the answering pennant for dates after 1999).

tom

--
History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people
maintaining a free civil government. -- Thomas Jefferson