A forgotten heroine who pioneered early years education in Bradford is to be honoured with a special plaque unveiling this week.

The Bradford: City for Peace group along with the city's Peace Museum are hoping to raise the profile of Miriam Lord when they install a plaque commemorating her life at Lilycroft Nursery and Primary School gates on Thursday.

At the same time the group will launch the latest edition of their Peace Trail booklet, which celebrates sites and stories and represents an inspiring heritage of action for justice and peace by local people.

The memorial to Miriam Lord will form part of the new Peace Trail, which allows local people and visitors to take walking tours of the city and see buildings, monuments and landmarks that chronicle Bradford's contribution to the peace movement.

Although there is a Miriam Lord School Primary School elsewhere in Manningham, there is no plaque recording what Miriam Lord did.

Lord was the founder of the national Open Air Nursery School movement, which began at Lilycroft.

The plaque which is funded by a grant from Bradford Council's Culture, Tourism and Sport Community Chest, will be situated on the front gatepost entrance to the school, opposite Manningham Mill flats.

The plaque reads: Miriam Lord (1885 - 1968) champion of Nursery children.

She was the first Headteacher, in 1921, of Lilycroft Open Air Nursery School with its emphasis on outdoor play.

Visitors came from across the world to see the new Nursery Movement in action.

The School is behind Lilycroft Primary School. Erected 2007 Three more plaques dedicated to unrecognised social champions are planned to be dedicated at separate events over the next months.

They comprise one at Textile Hall, Westgate, to commemorate the 1917 Women's Humanity League anti-war demonstration; one for Florence White, Bradford's national campaigner in the 1930s for lowering the age of pensions for women, which will be at the Mechanic Institute; and Norman Angell, the Bradford MP who went on to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933.

At the Lilycroft event on Thursday Dr Brenda Thomson of the Bradford City for Peace group will also launch the new edition of the Peace Trail booklet, which outlines all these landmarks and more. Since the first edition was launched in November last year, all 2,500 copies from the initial print run have been snapped up.

Peter Nias of the Bradford Peace Museum said: "We are very pleased that the booklet hasd been so successful. We have also set a very high standard in quality of content and design.

"From Bradford's model, there has been interest to do similar publications from Leeds, Manchester, London and as far afield as Vienna, Istanbul and Philadelphia."

Free copies are available at the launch and at the Tourist Information Centre at City Hall, at the Kirkgate Shopping Centre information desk and in public libraries across the District.

Highlights from the Peace Trail include:

  • The peace sculpture created during last year's Bradford District Peace Festival and presented in memory of PC Sharon Beshenivsky, 38, who was shot dead in the city. It is on permanent display in the new police headquarters on Nelson Street
  • The statue of Bradford-born author J B Priestley in front of the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television which earns a mention for the author and playwright's inspiration to the CND for his letter to the New Statesman questioning Britain's place in the nuclear arms race.
  • The area in front of the Alhambra contains the war memorial remembering the fallen of the world wars and conflicts since.
  • The statue of Richard Oastler, the leader of the Ten-Hour Movement which campaigned to improve the plight of Victorian factory children.
  • The Waterstone's bookshop at the former Wool Exchange where stands the statue of Richard Cobden, the Victorian-era MP who campaigned for an end to the Corn Laws which were causing hardship for the poor. He also took a stance against the Crimean War and worked with the Peace Society.
  • Great Horton Road, where there is a plaque to Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the outside of the German Evangelical Church opposite Bradford College. The German pastor who visited Bradford in 1933 was executed by the Nazis in 1945. He campaigned against fascism in his home country.
  • A blue plaque marks the house at 49 Hanover Square where school dinners pioneer Margaret McMillan lived with her sister from 1893 to 1902.
  • The aircraft lookout point on the roof of the T J Hughes store on Godwin Street. During the Second World War this was the highest point of any occupied building in the city centre so was used as a lookout for approaching enemy bombers.