Journalist and civil rights activist to be honoured with a blue plaque
Tuesday, 18th October 2022 — By Angela Cobbinah
Claudia Jones is at last to be honoured with a coveted blue plaque, but it won’t be at her former home in Lisburne Road, Gospel Oak.
English Heritage has chosen to install it instead at an address in Lambeth, where she lived for four years until 1960.
“I am delighted that Claudia is to get a blue plaque as it is long overdue, but I am disappointed that it will not be in Camden, “ said former Camden councillor Gerry Harrison, who had been campaigning for English Heritage to recognise the civil rights heroine.
Jones lived in the ground-floor flat at Lisburne Road until her sudden death in 1964 and is buried in Highgate Cemetery.
“I still think Lisburne Road is the better choice as she died there and is buried nearby,” said Mr Harrison, who represented South End Green ward for Labour for eight years until 2002. “The house was in my ward and I included it as a stop on the local history walks I used to do. But I had met Claudia Jones many years earlier at a meeting in Notting Hill at which she spoke.”
However, he credits former New Journal editor Eric Gordon for getting him to campaign for a plaque. “Eric kept saying ‘you’ve really got to do something about Claudia’. He wrote several articles about it in his John Gulliver column and he continued to pester me even when I stepped down from the council in 2006.”
Mr Harrison, who already had experience of English Heritage in his work as a councillor, said it was supportive of the idea. “However, the [blue plaque] committee only meets twice a year so it took a bit of time.”
Earlier this year, the organisation agreed to commemorate Jones, deciding to go for Meadow Road in Vauxhall, where she lived when she set up her newspaper the West Indian Gazette in Brixton. It was also the address at which she lived the longest in London, it said. It is scheduled to be installed sometime next year.
Jones arrived in the capital in 1955 following her deportation from the US during the anti-communist witch hunts. She would go on to play a pivotal role in the anti-racism struggle in the UK, particularly in the aftermath of the 1958 Notting Hill riots when she launched the Gazette as a campaign platform.
