A blue plaque for Daphne Du Maurier?- Novelist's Hampstead connection set for tribute at Well Road home.

Published: 03 February 2011
by RICHARD OSLEY

HER name was rejected by the panel of historians at English Heritage who deliberate over who should be acknowledged with one of its famous blue plaques.

But celebrated novelist Daphne Du Maurier’s Hampstead connection looks set to finally be recognised with a tribute at her former home in Well Road.

The Heath and Hampstead Society has set up its own plaque scheme and have asked planners at the Town Hall for permission to attach a plaque to the boundary wall at Providence Corner marking of her ex-residence at Cannon Hall.

Papers and designs are filed at the planning department and officials are looking to see whether fixing the building breaches planning regulations for listed buildings. The documents can be seen on the council’s website. It is not thought that the application will run into trouble.

Du Maurier, famous for her Gothic thrillers and haunting classics including Rebecca, Don’t Look Now and  The Birds, spent her childhood in Hampstead in the 1930s.

The New Journal revealed in 2008 how English Heritage had been asked to honour du Maurier with its famous blue plaque scheme but the suggestion did not make it through to a final shortlist. Judges were unsure whether to mark du Maurier’s former home in Cornwall – the mansion known as Menabilly which was  the inspiration for the haunted Manderley estate in Rebecca – instead.
Du Maurier died in 1989.