2nd June 2019
Blue Plaque unveiled at Richard Jefferies Museum
Today, at long last, a blue plaque for Richard Jefferies!
In actual fact at the Richard Jefferies Museum at Coate Yay!
I’m so pleased to see this. There’s a blue plaque in Surbiton on the house where Jefferies and his wife lived. There’s even a non-blue plaque on Surbiton library. So it’s high-time his birthplace in Swindon got one.
This video on my under-used Born again Swindonian YouTube channel shows Mike Pringle unveiling the blue plaque for Richard Jefferies:
The other plaques that Mike refers to:
The Blue Plaque for Richard Jefferies over the blue front door of the museum.
The bust of Richard Jefferies looks down over his new plaque!
Also on the subject of blue plaques in Swindon is this almost comprehensive post: https://swindonian.me/2018/08/16/blue-plaques-in-swindon/ The post contains a Google map that takes you round most of them. I should get that updated really …
See also about the Richard Jefferies museum here. And the
Richard Jeffries society here.
And there’s more on Swindon’s blue plaques on this Swindon Heritage blue plaques webpage.
About Richard Jefferies
The Richard Jeffies museum website has lots of information about the author. Here’s a small extract:
‘Richard Jefferies (christened John Richard Jefferies) was a Victorian nature writer with a passion for the English countryside and the richness that he saw all around him. He was born at the house which is now the museum, in Coate, Swindon, on the 6th November 1848, and died at the tragically early age of 38 on 14th August 1887. Noted for his depiction of English rural life in essays, books of natural history, and novels, his childhood at Coate had a great influence on him and provides the background to all his major works of fiction …’
See also on the blog:
