Hello, I am a member of a team that is building an open directory of commemorative plaques http://openplaques.org it is sort of a “blue plaques Wikipedia”. We are a volunteer community that want to raise awareness of local history.

Information and photos are collected by amateur historians throughout the country (and the rest of the world) and are then available for anyone to use under a Public Domain licence. As the number of plaques collected has grown we’ve been pleasantly surprised at just how many there are outside of London, and also how many have been erected by civic societies and other specialist organisations. We have a list of the http://openplaques.org/organisations we have found so far which may well include some that are represented on this forum.

There will almost certainly be many plaques that we don’t know about yet. The collection is a constant work-in-progress. If you have any information to add, it can be done via our web site or you can contact us direct and we’ll assist.

For the photos, we encourage local people to explore their area and their local history and publish images under an open licence on popular photo sites such as Flickr or Wikimedia. It’s all about getting people out there and thinking about the stories that are often right under their noses (on a nearby wall that is).

We’d like to add features that would be useful on a local level, for example the ability to generate a history walk for a town which could then be taken and published on your own web site. So, if anyone has any ideas then we’d love to hear them.

Thanks for your time,
 
  Jez (from the Open Plaques team)