Science & Engineering

The museums, the machines and the men and women who worked it out: laboratories kept as they were, beam engines under steam, the tunnel, the barrier, the roofs, and the plaques on the houses where the ideas came.

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Rosalind Franklin's flat, Donovan Court

The Chelsea flat of the crystallographer whose Photo 51 showed the shape of DNA, a mile from the King's College laboratory where she took it.

Statues & plaquesFree

Photo by Spudgun67, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Franklin lived at Donovan Court on Drayton Gardens from 1951 to 1958, the years of the X-ray diffraction work at King's College on the Strand that produced Photo 51, the image of DNA's helix that Watson and Crick were shown without her knowledge and built their model from; she moved to Birkbeck to work on viruses and died of cancer at thirty-seven, four years before the Nobel prize that could not be given to her. English Heritage's plaque went up in 1992; the King's building that houses the labs is named for her and Wilkins.

Where
Donovan Court, 107 Drayton Gardens, SW10 9QS
Nearest station
Gloucester Road · 11 min walk

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