Blue plaque for Mass-Obs

English Heritage has marked with a blue plaque the original headquarters of Mass-Observation. The large detached house, on the edge of Blackheath village in SE London, was the home of Mass-Obs co-founder, Charles Madge (1912-1996), and served as its national office for two years from its inception in 1937. Madge himself was a poet and a journalist for the Daily Mirror.

The Mass-Observation website relates the story of how the organisation was founded to collect data on social attitudes and create an ‘anthropology of ourselves’. These data are now archived as part of the University of Sussex’s Special Collections.