This feature first appeared in April 2024 on Londonist: Time Machine, our much-praised history newsletter. To be the first to read new history features like this, sign up for free here.

Walk around Soho and Covent Garden and one name pops up time and time again. John Logie Baird, Scottish-born inventor of television, seems to have broadcast his achievements to half the streets in the area.
Here’s the most famous example. Baird’s official Blue Plaque can be found on 22 Frith Street, Soho — on the wall of Bar Italia.

The claim made here is that television was first demonstrated in the building in 1926. A brass plaque with further details below confirms this:

And, below this, in 2024 was added a World Origin Sites plaque:

But round the corner, yet another plaque suggests something very similar. This one’s attached to a building on the corner of St Martin’s Lane and West Street.

This one notes the first experimental television transmissions 1926-1928. (Incidentally, it’s positioned on the offices of Equity, the actors’ union, which carries a second plaque to Sir Alec Guinness.)
Practically next door on the wall of the Long Acre bar is a fifth plaque, this time leaping forward a few years:

This one’s been put up by a pub chain, to celebrate the location of Logie Baird’s first broadcast (as opposed to a small-scale experiment) in 1929. But cross the road and walk around the corner and you’ll find our sixth plaque making a very similar assertion:

This plaque also commemorates the first broadcast, and gives a more precise date of 30 September 1929. What’s going on here?

The first television programme
Plaques 5 and 6 are most easily dealt with. They both record the same event, when Baird broadcast a television programme — the first ever — from his offices above 133 Long Acre. The stone plaque (number 6) is on the correct building. Plaque 5, round the corner on the Long Acre pub, is a cheeky bit of heritage pickpocketing. The events it describes did not happen in the pub itself, but a short walk away. (It’d be like the Red Lion pub on Whitehall displaying a plaque to ex-Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who ‘worked’ round the corner in 10 Downing Street… though that would surely drive off custom.) It doesn’t even get the door number right, plumping for 132 Long Acre rather than 133. I dub it London’s least satisfying plaque.
By 1929, Baird had perfected the technology to the point where he could begin a regular service. But how to transmit? His own rooftop experiments proved too weak for general broadcast, so he persuaded the BBC to lend him the use of of its 2LO radio transmitter. 30 September 1929 was the first occasion on which this was trialled. The action was filmed at 133 Long Acre, passed by landline to 2LO on Oxford Street, and then broadcast over the airwaves.

What exactly would you have seen had you been able to tune into that first television programme?
Proceedings opened in audio only, with announcer Sydney Moseley introducing the show. Then came the picture. The first person ever to appear on broadcast television was Professor Sir Ambrose Fleming, President of the Television Society and inventor of the thermionic valve. Those few lucky people with experimental television sets watched as the screen flickered into life. But something was wrong. Sir Ambrose did not appear as expected. According to a reporter, watching in a dark room at Long Acre:
“The picture showed Sir Ambrose with a face as black as soot, hair as white as snow, and lips the colour of chalk.”
The team immediately realised that the broadcast had gone out in the negative. A switch was flicked, Sir Ambrose returned to his true contrasts and delivered some remarks about the new technology.
He was followed by further monologues from William Graham MP (the first parliamentarian to be televised), UCL professor Edward Andrade, Yorkshire comedian Sydney Howard (the first light entertainment on TV), then two singers, Miss Lulu Stanley and Miss C. King. The first song broadcast by television was He’s Tall, and Dark, and Handsome, by Miss Stanley… a version of which can be heard here:
Viewing figures were perforce tiny. Only Baird and a handful of his friends owned sets. Sound and vision could not, at this stage, be broadcast simultaneously, so the audience had to first listen and then watch. It was a humble beginning, but television would soon blossom into one of the defining technologies of the century.
What about the other plaques?
That’s Plaques 5 and 6 explained, but what about the three on Frith Street and that on St Martin’s Lane? These cover the earlier dates of 1926 and 1926-28 respectively. Frith Street (Plaques 1-3) was where Baird first demonstrated the transmission of moving images to members of the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times on 26 January 1926. This was a very short-range transmission, filmed and viewed in the same set of rooms.
The St Martin’s Lane location (Plaque 4) marks the building in which Baird established his company, Television Limited, in the months following that first demonstration. It was from here that he made his first test transmissions beyond his own front door, reaching a receiver in Harrow (with some help from a BBC transmitter). It could be argued that this was technically the first ‘broadcast’ but, as Baird was the only person with the equipment to watch the transmission, it would be a very poor use of the word ‘broadcast’.
Baird has other London memorials. His home at 3 Crescent Wood Road, Sydenham is marked by a second Blue Plaque (he’s a rare recipient of more than one). Meanwhile, a plaque on Lisle Street notes the supplier who provided Baird with much of his equipment. His most prominent commemoration, though, is on the wonderful Spirit of Soho mural just off Carnaby Street. I reckon he has the biggest portrait of any of the great and good shown on that wall painting:

Throw in another commemoration at the site of his receiving station, and the (now defunct) John Logie Baird pub in Muswell Hill, and our man must be one of the most memorialised people in the capital.