Samuel Taylor Coleridge Blue Plaque

About This Blue Plaque

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was a pioneering English poet, philosopher, and literary critic who famously co-authored the poetry collection “Lyrical Ballads” with his friend William Wordsworth in 1798. This groundbreaking work included Coleridge’s legendary poem “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and is considered a seminal text of the Romantic Movement.

Coleridge was born in 1772 in Ottery St Mary, Devon. After attending Jesus College, Cambridge, he pursued a life dedicated to writing, thinking, and engaging with the major intellectual currents of his time. In addition to “Lyrical Ballads”, his most celebrated works include the visionary poems “Kubla Khan” and “Christabel”, as well as influential prose such as “Biographia Literaria”.

In 1812-1813, Coleridge lived in a house on this site at 71 Berners Street in the borough of Westminster. Westminster has long been London’s political and cultural heart, home to the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and numerous other landmarks. The diverse luminaries who have called it home range from Mozart to Churchill. For Coleridge, this stint in central London would have placed him at the very center of the metropolis during a time of great social and artistic ferment.

A complex figure, Coleridge battled opium addiction for much of his adult life, which influenced his philosophical and metaphysical reflections. He died in 1834 in Highgate, London. Today, Coleridge is remembered as one of the most inventive, insightful, and eloquent voices of his generation, a thinker whose works merged the poetic and the philosophical to help define the spirit of the Romantic age.