The Angelican Communion News Service reported that CS Lewis’ Oxford home, The Kilns will be recieving a Blue Plaque that will commemorate the home as an important historical landmark. Below is an excerpt from the article.
“We have very stringent rules and only award blue plaques for the highest level of achievement,” says Eda Forbes, secretary to the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board ahead of the unveiling this week of a special plaque at The Kilns, the home of the scholar, author and Christian thinker C.S. Lewis, who died in 1963.
Today, Lewis’s work continues to touch the lives of millions, not least through Disney’s The Chronicles of Narnia films. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe came first and now Prince Caspian, the second movie in the series, is on general release in the UK. This month has also seen the publication of a new edition of C.S. Lewis’s 1942 bestseller, The Screwtape Letters, in which a senior devil writes words of advice to a junior devil. In all, Lewis wrote 40 books, most of which are still in print. His sales to date total around 100 million copies in 35 languages.
Lewis lived at The Kilns, now in Lewis Close, Headington, Oxford, from 1930 to 1963 and it was there that he wrote many of his works, including the Narnia series of books, based on four children who lived with Lewis and his family as evacuees during the Second World War. Today in The Kilns, now a Christian study centre owned and restored by the California-based C.S. Lewis Foundation, a period wardrobe stands in the hallway in the very place where one stood in Lewis’s day. It was a wardrobe that gave the Oxford don the idea for a gateway through which his young characters could enter the magical world of Narnia.
Walter Hooper, Lewis’s former secretary and literary advisor to his estate, will unveil the C.S. Lewis blue plaque on Saturday 26 July at 10.30 a.m. Sir Hugo Brunner, Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire and chairman of the Oxfordshire Blue Plaques Board, will explain why his board decided to designate The Kilns as an historic landmark to mark the contribution of C.S. Lewis to scholarship and literature. Stan Mattson, founder and president of the C.S. Lewis Foundation, will also speak on the importance of Lewis for today and introduce Oxbridge 2008, the Foundation’s two-week conference that immediately follows Saturday’s blue plaque event.
Others who have indicated they will attend the ceremony include the Lord Mayor of Oxford (Councillor Susanna Pressel), the chairman of Oxfordshire County Council (Councillor Tony Crabbe), the chairman of South Oxfordshire District Council (Councillor Colin Dawkes) and the chairman of the Oxford Civic Society (Mr Tony Joyce). Professor David Clary, president of Magdalen College, where Lewis taught, is also expected to be present.
