So this is my first blog post for www.blueplaquelondon.co.uk. I wanted to start the site and the blog as I've always felt a strong affinity with London's history, and it seems to me that their are few better, representations of this than English Heritages blue plaque scheme. Over the next year or so I hope to be able to make a personal visit to the 800+ buildings that have been home or work to the people deemed by English heritage to have met it's tough criteria.
So last Friday, 6th July 2007 Jess and I headed up to Tottenham Hale to visit the plaque of Luke Howard "The namer of clouds" I'd never heard his name before and was very surprised by what an important contribution he had made to our heritage and the world of meteorology. In 1803 Luke Howard published a paper called Essay on the Modification of Clouds in which he outlined what he thought should be the process for classifying clouds. So the names that we are all familiar with today, such as, stratus, cirrus and cumulus began to be used across the world to
describe the different formations in the sky.
The visit was a bit upsetting, in that the house has fallen into a state of disrepair, with broken windows and lots of surrounding it. It would be nice to see such a historic building being treated as well as it treated it's most famous resident as Luke Howard went on to live until the ripe old age of 91!
After the photos we took a walk up near the Lockwood reservoir. The sky was so huge up there it was easy to imagine Luke Howard stood in the very same spot 200 years ago looking up in to the sky planning his groundbreaking paper.
In the second photo below you can just make out Canary Wharf between the two pylons in the centre of the shot.
