Matt Monro Forum

My wife and I will be visiting London this July. It will be my first visit there. I was wondering if there are any sites associated with Matt and his music. Matt was not very widely appreciated in America, but I hoped maybe in his native London there is some location that serves as a tribute to him, maybe even a Matt Monro museum. Can you recommend any place? Thanks!

Hi,

I'm afraid there is nothing to commemorate Matt anywhere in London and certainly no museum (that would be nice!). The best I can suggest if you want to visit some of the places associated with Matt is to look up some in his Biography. However London is now a very different place so very few of them actually still exist.

Lena & Harry - long time members of this board and who live in London or at least close to it may have some suggestions I suppose.

Sorry I can't help any more than that

Good to see you posting again Jersey Warren, after a 6 year break ..............Matt had two hits in the USA My Kind of Girl and Walk Away............but that was long time ago now ...............but the big singers Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Sammy Davis, Tony Bennett, Jack Jones, Bobby Darin, Johnny Mathis, Gordon MaCrae all knew how good a singer Matt was

Does anyone agree with me that not only should Matt have received some recognition with an MBE or CBE etc...........(we all know it should be Sir Matt Monro) ...............but doesn't Matt deserve to have a "Blue Plaque" recognition in his honour ............they are placed at properties were famous people were born or resided at during their life

Yes recognition for Matt would be nice.

There is a blue plaque at a former home of Dusty's in Aubrey Walk which I believe has now been converted into flats.

I agree robert and there was a small campaign to get one put on Matt's old house at Dallas Road where the family lived (and remained his London base even when he went to the USA) from the early 60's though to hiss death but after Michele initially heard I think it sank without trace.

I very much doubt that Matt's childhood home still exists - it probably says something in The Singer's Singer about it but I don't have it to hand.

It would have been nice for Matt to have some recognition he so deserved it, the BEST singer to come out of the UK it is really a shame.

It's a shame we don't have something similar to Los Angeles, I have seen the stars on the sidewalk there, we have a lot of famous stars here who deserve to be recognised. Last month I even saw a statue of Freddy Mercury in Montreaux which always has flowers around it, it's right down by the lake.

With Michele's consent I applied to English Heritage to have a blue plaque put up on Matt's first home several years ago now. It was in a tenement building in Shoreditch and it still existed then as my son photographed it. Apparently applications have to be more than ten years between them, and there had been another a few years earlier, English Heritage turned down mine for this reason.

Why would it be turned down in the first place I wonder?

There are plaques on some Edinburgh buildings that so and so lived there in the past.

There is a English Heritage rule that a person has to be deceased by a certain number of years before they are even considered for a plaque, maybe Matt's time didn't apply at the time.
I wish I could access the application I made but it was on an old computer I had then. Michele gave me a lot of information to use, some of which isn't in her book, due to keeping the size limited I presume.
Anyway, I remember Matt's first home was 4, Lever Buildings, Lever Street in Shoreditch, he might even have been born there. His early school was Bath Street School in Bath Street which is at the end of Lever Street.

Marian Matt has been gone much longer than Dusty and her plaque was put up years ago, actually it was done twice the second time after the building was renovated and Robin Gibb & Madeline Bell were among those at the ceremony.

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.527481, ... 0?hl=en-US

Leaver Buildings is still there! (at least it was back in Jul2014 when Google last updated street view) It was for sale at the time.

Can't see any indication of the school still existing. There is a St Luke's Primary on Bath Street but that is a more modern building.