Blue plaque for Ada Salter
'Ada Salter became the first female mayor of a London borough in 1922.'
English Heritage will be unveiling a blue plaque to commemorate the Quaker Ada Salter.
Ada Salter became the first female mayor of a London borough in 1922, the first Labour woman to be elected as a mayor anywhere in Britain.
English Heritage said she had a ‘profound and lasting impact’ on the then-deprived borough of Bermondsey. By the end of the 1930s, it ‘boasted a public health service, palatial baths and wash-houses, and ambitious programmes to clear slums, build new housing and playgrounds, and plant thousands of trees’, it said.
The plaque will mark the Southwark building where Ada lived in the late 1890s.
Other people nominated for 2023 blue plaques include: Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist and composer, and Claudia Jones, dubbed ‘the founding spirit of Notting Hill Carnival’, as well as suffragettes Emily Wilding Davison and Sophia Duleep Singh.
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