The Cambridge First All-Ladies Fire Brigade

Hertha Ayrton Year, aka 2026, has started strong. 

After months of form-filling, extended arguments with helpdesks, and support from many and various techie types, we have finally convinced Google Maps to put Hertha Ayrton on the map! 

This mission started last year, when we realised that Hertha’s blue plaque was incorrectly named on Google Maps. This blue plaque is part of a long-standing English Heritage scheme that marks buildings where notable people lived or worked. Hertha’s London plaque (there are others around the country!) is on the outside of 41 Norfolk Square near Paddington. But Google Maps had it marked down as “Bertha Ayrton” on their database:

Really? BERTHA Ayrton? The correct name is literally on the blue plaque that the Google Maps reference points to. And yet, when we filed a ticket to report the error, our ticket was rejected. So were tickets from two other frequent Google Maps contributors.   

This home in Norfolk Square is the building that Hertha moved into with her husband William Ayrton in 1903. Only a few years later he sadly died, but Hertha continued to live there for the rest of her life, turning the drawing room into an home laboratory for her physics experiments and research. 

This same house was where she conducted her research into arc lamps, invented the Ayrton Fan to clear poison gas from World War 1 trenches, hosted Census Evasion parties in 1911, and nursed hunger-striking suffragettes including Emmeline Pankhurst back to health while police guarded the front and back entrances and even watched the house from a nearby roof.  

All this, and the requested change from BERTHA to HERTHA was still refused.

Only when one of our kind Google-savvy supporters went – as he puts it – “FULL KAREN” in an error report, did something happen. After a few more weeks of back-and-forth, Google Maps has now put Hertha Ayrton back on the map. 

Here’s what it looks like now, when you search for her London blue plaque on Google Maps: 

And now, here’s what happens when you Google the phrase “Google Maps Hertha Ayrton”:

Mission accomplished!