From Freddie Mercury to Ava Gardner, see the names honoured with a blue plaque this year

FREDDIE MERCURY. Ava Gardner. Bobby Moore. Tommy Cooper.

Not the roll call for a fantasy Come Dine With Me special, but just a few of the names to be honoured with a blue plaque this year.

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Celebrating its 150th anniversary in May, London’s blue plaque scheme is like an intellectual version of the stars on Hollywood Boulevard’s Walk of Fame — although Alfred Hitchcock, Vivien Leigh and now Ava Gardner manage the double.

The handsome blue plaques offer a memorial, history lesson and Twitter-friendly biography in one and pop up all over the capital — from posh neighbourhoods to suburban streets and flyblown dual carriageways.

The first “celeb” to be honoured was poet Lord Byron, followed shortly by Nelson and US Founding Father Benjamin Franklin, although the original plaques were brown and decided on by the Royal Society of Arts.

Now in the hands of English Heritage, the scheme also welcomes to the fold in 2016: Irish writer Samuel Beckett, ballet dancer Margot Fonteyn and Laurie Cunningham, one of the first black footballers to play for England.

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Anyone can be put forward for a plaque as long as they are dead and have a link to an address in London. And some buildings are so storied there’s a choice. John Lennon, for example, moved into Jimi Hendrix’s old flat in Marylebone, where his plaque resides. Jimi meanwhile, shares the honours with George Frideric Handel, at a Mayfair townhouse both lived in, two centuries apart.

The final say is down to a panel of experts and the owner of the property.

Owners do not always want the attention, perhaps mindful of the fate of Karl Marx’s first plaque in Chalk Farm.

It went up in 1937 but eventually had to be taken down after repeated vandalism.

Its replacement suffered the same fate and the owner of the house declined a third.

Marx eventually got another one in Dean Street in 1967, but even that ruffled feathers.

You can find out more facts when English Heritage hosts walking tours on the anniversary weekend of May 7-8.

But don’t worry if you can’t make it. There is a smartphone app on the way that will turn those six or seven-word blue plaque biographies into proper testimonials. A Kapital plan, as Marx might say.

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