Birth houses

We came across the house where Oliver Cromwell was born, in Huntingdon, the other day, illustrated. There is an elaborate plaque to the birth, just visible above the entrance, on the right. And now the house is the Cromwell House care home, caring for all kinds of lesser mortals.

At the time it struck me as rather incongruous that the birthplace of this national figure, big on the English scene, if bad on the Irish scene, should end up in this way.

But one is one to do? We mostly memorialise our national figures by means of statues in public places - parks and squares - outdoors and by means of church memorials indoors. We might stick blue plaques on the walls of buildings which they passed through in life, but we do not, generally speaking, particularly mark the places of their births and deaths. And that seems about right: a blue plaque is reasonably discrete and does not make any claim on the building concerned - whereas the rather more elaborate plaque above the door of this building does.

Elaborate plaques should be reserved for the case when the building in question has itself been made into some kind of memorial, perhaps a museum devoted to the life and deeds, good and bad, of the subject. In the way, for example, of the Remington Museum in Ogdensburg. See the first museum at reference 1. But something which we are only going to do in exceptional cases; in the ordinary way we are going to want to recycle such buildings. We cannot afford to make museums or even mausoleums of all the buildings through which a big cheese happened to have passed at some point or other.

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/two-more-museums.html.