Benjamin Britten
173 Cromwell Road · composer, and his life with Peter Pears
Benjamin Britten was the leading British composer of his generation – Peter Grimes, the War Requiem, a shelf of operas – and the founder, with the tenor Peter Pears, of the Aldeburgh Festival. Pears was his partner for nearly forty years and the voice he wrote for again and again.
The two men shared a flat at 173 Cromwell Road in the late 1930s. Their life together, lived openly among friends long before the law caught up, is one of the great creative partnerships in English music. English Heritage’s blue plaque is here.