Watch how London’s Blue Plaques are made as Freddie Mercury gets a tribute outside his family home

Meet the couple who create the plaques by hand in their Cornish home
Amy Ashenden3 September 2016

A handmade Blue Plaque commemorating Queen frontman Freddie Mercury’s life has been unveiled in west London on what would have been his seventieth birthday.

The plaque, which requires “enormous patience” to create, is the latest to be handmade by Frank and Sue Ashworth at their home and studio in Cornwall.

The couple have been creating the plaques by hand, which can be seen around the capital, since 1984.

The English Heritage Blue Plaques are a series of tributes created over the past 150 years to mark London’s iconic history of artists, musicians, politicians, scientists and sports heroes.

Frank Ashworth said: “Making a plaque is quite a complicated and difficult process – you have to discipline yourself to a certain concentration.

“I think of the person who is being commemorated and I find it interesting that they lived in such and such a house.

“I try and visualise in my mind what sort of person they were and what they would think about a plaque being put up for them.

“When I walk along the London streets and come across a Blue Plaque, I look at it and it gives me quite a tingle to think that I was involved in making that.”

The latest Blue Plaque can be found at Freddie Mercury's previous family home in Feltham 
English Heritage/Lucy Millson-Watkins

The lettering on the plaques is the most difficult part as it requires “a good eye and enormous patience”, explains Sue Ashworth.

She said: “I think the special thing is [that] one is involved in this very careful process to try and do something worthy of the people who are brought into attention.

“I do enjoy working in my own time and not being under pressure – the pressure comes from finishing the execution of this while the clay is still in the right condition.

“It is problem solving in a way.

“When I walk past a building with one of our plaques on, I get that ltitle surprise and think ‘goodness, we made that’.”

The latest Blue Plaque, a tribute to Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, has now been placed outside his family home in Feltham that his parents bought in 1964 after the family left Zanzibar for the UK.

Freddie was still living in the house when he met future Queen bandmates guitarist Brian May and drummer Roger Taylor while studying in Ealing.

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