Camden New Journal - News: Never mind the Burgh House, here’s the Sex Pistols

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Camden New Journal - By RICHARD OSLEY
Published: 31 January 2008

Pictured: The Sex Pistols’ lead singer Johnny Rotten (John Lydon)

Never mind the Burgh House, here’s the Sex Pistols

THEIR plaques normally commemorate the high-brow: they range from the great Victorian Liberal reforming Prime Minster Herbert Asquith, romantic landscape painter John Constable through to more the bizarre, including Henry Cole, credited with inventing Christmas cards.
But now the Heath and Hampstead Society’s plaque committee are considering whether they should mark the squat where punk band The Sex Pistols were living when they had a hit with controversial anti-establishment record God Save The Queen.
The society, which has run a scheme to commemorate the famous inhabitants of Hampstead for more than 20 years, has decided to open its shortlists to the public and are looking for suggestions of worthies who deserve to be recognised.
The Sex Pistols lived in the tumbledown flat off Flask Walk in 1977, where the band rehearsed their anti-Royalist single to coincide with the Queen’s silver jubilee celebrations.
The society’s plaque committee, which includes Burgh House’s Hampstead museum curator Carol Seigel and historian Christopher Wade, plan to add another three to four each year.
Committee chairman Frank Harding said: “The only criteria is the person should have made a positive contribution to the area and been dead for 20 years. We want to mark people who have made a contribution to Hampstead, the UK and society in general – and if the Sex Pistols have done that, they will be properly considered.”

• To mark the new plaque campaign, the committee are holding a competition: the first person to email Mr Harding the names and addresses of 27 plaques currently up will win a dinner for two at Base, a Mediterranean bistro in Hampstead. Two runners up will receive a bottle of champagne.
Suggestions for new plaques can be sent to Frank Harding at frankaharding@btinternet.com or by post to 11 Pilgrim’s Lane, NW3 1SJ.

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