Britain to honour Krishna Menon with blue plaque

India's first high commissioner to Britain, V K Krishna Menon will be honoured posthumously with a blue plaque at the north London residence where he stayed when he first moved to the city before India's Independence.
London's blue plaques commemorate the link between notable figures of the past and the buildings in which they lived and worked and India's former defence minister now joins the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, with one in his memory at 30 Langdon Park Road in Highgate.
Menon, known for his love for the city and an active social and political life during his long stay in the UK, lived at the north London home from 1929 to 1931.

The plaque will be unveiled by former Labour Cabinet minister Tony Benn tomorrow, whose father William Wedgwood Benn was Secretary of State for India from 1929 to 1931 when Menon was campaigning for Indian independence in Britain.
James Callaghan, Britain's former Labour Prime Minister, described Menon as "the embodiment of the movement within Britain for India's freedom".
Menon moved to England from Madras (now Chennai) in 1924 and he was elected as a Labour councillor for the borough of St Pancras in central London in 1934.

He held the seat for 14 years and is credited with introducing travelling libraries and children's corners in the area.

During World War II, he served as an air warden around Camden Square where he was living at the time.
In 1955, he was made a freeman of St Pancras, only the second person ever to be given the honour - the first being author George Bernard Shaw.
The London-wide blue plaques scheme has been running for over 140 years, and now comprises around 850 plaques.
Of these, nearly a dozen are in memory of famous Indians who lived and worked in the city, including the likes of former home minister Sardar Vallabhai Patel and poet Rabindranath Tagore.