Blue Plaque: 1867 - 2013? - Telegraph It's true the cuts are deep: English Heritage's annual budget has been slashed from £130 million to £92 million. But surely the money can be found to save these peerless time capsules - perhaps from a private sponsor? You could produce the same intellectual effect with an iPhone app that told you where distinguished Londoners once lived, but it wouldn't look nearly so handsome. To start with, the plaques are beautifully made out of glazed clay. And they're ingeniously designed - with partly hollow backs to make them lighter and easier to cement on to a wall, and a glazed, domed surface that means they are cleverly self-cleaning, with hardly any upkeep required. What's more, it shouldn't cost much to keep on making them: they're only 19 inches in diameter, and two inches thick - and, for the past 20 years, they've been quickly and cheaply designed on a computer. Over the century and a half since the plaques made their appearance - the first noted the residence of Lord Byron in Holles Street, just north of Oxford Street, and was in the chocolate-brown livery of the Royal Society of Arts - we've had much worse economic times, but still the plaques kept on coming. In 1901, the London County Council took over the scheme, moving to blue plaques in 1921; the Greater London Council ran the programme from 1965 until 1986, when English Heritage took over. There are now 850 of them - each one a new, stylishly visible layer of London history. They are universally loved, and only one has ever been taken down - Karl Marx's plaque at 41 Maitland Park Road in Chalk Farm, north London. He was commemorated in 1935, only to have his memorial removed shortly afterwards, because of repeated vandalism. The plaques are at one with Education Secretary Michael Gove's admirable plans for a knowledge-packed history curriculum, with a strong emphasis on kings, queens, great battles and British heroes, when they were around, and what they did. But they are also more than just a collection of facts and dates, crucial as those things are. The knowledge of where someone once lived - particularly if it is at odds with their later fame and fortune - gives a peculiarly moving insight into their story. We all feel a strong pull back to where we're from, even if we were once desperate to escape the place. It's telling that Anthony Hopkins, now living in a palace in Malibu, California, keeps on being drawn back to his childhood home in Port Talbot, the industrial town just east of Swansea. This is a hard, gritty area of back-to-back houses, squeezed between an elevated stretch of the M4 and smoking steelworks on the coast of the Bristol Channel. But Hopkins still held his 70th birthday party there - and, on a recent surprise visit to his childhood two-up, two-down, asked to buy it off the current owners. A touch of stardust gives bricks and mortar an emotional, as well as a historical, attraction. The Welsh Streets in Liverpool - the handsome terraced roads with Welsh names, threatened with demolition by John Prescott's disastrous Pathfinder scheme - were given a stay of execution last year. Their survival is in part thanks to the importance of one particular house: Ringo Starr's childhood home at 9 Madryn Street. Hopkins and Starr aren't yet eligible for a plaque of their own: you have to have been dead for 20 years, or have passed the centenary of your birth, to be considered for one. Then there is the thorny issue of location. While English Heritage now has a one-plaque-per-subject rule, some have collected many more. Of the 32 Dickens-related plaques in Britain, the most moving is at 6 Chandos Place in Covent Garden - site of the blacking factory where he had a miserable childhood job in 1824-5. It doesn't matter if you hated the place where you lived or worked: the blue plaque rules state only that "a person's residence in London should have been a significant period, in time or in importance, within their life and work." Indeed, while London's scheme has inspired countless imitators, both in Britain and other countries, the blue plaques proper are - or, God forbid, were - one of the capital's exclusive glories. Above all, they give an unparalleled insight into the shifting fortunes of the greatest city in the world. Just near me, in Camden Town, north London, there are plaques to George Orwell and Dylan Thomas. It is now million-pound-plus territory: the stamping ground of Gwyneth Paltrow, Jamie Oliver and the late Amy Winehouse. But Orwell's house was once part of quintessential bedsitter-land, the inspiration for Willowbed Road in Keep the Aspidistra Flying - a street that "contrived to keep up a kind of mingy, lower middle-class decency." Even though Orwell's blue plaque is on the grand first floor, he was in fact lodging in "a top floor back" - with lower ceilings and smaller rooms - and "on the windowsill there was a sickly aspidistra in a green-glazed pot." Dylan Thomas had only two years left to live when he moved to Delancey Street in Camden in 1951. But, despite his fame, he was in dire straits. He was lent the three-bedroom basement flat (again, the plaque is on the smarter first floor, where it's more visible) by the wife of the historian AJP Taylor. Thomas despaired of the flat: "Our new London house of horror, on bus and night lorry route and opposite railway bridge and shunting station," he wrote. I'm a long-time fan of both writers. But I'd have known little of the enthrallingly dreary, everyday detail of their lives - or the bleak, mid-20th-century gloom of my corner of the world - but for those two little blue discs. It would leave a grim void in the history of London, and Britain, if they came to an end.