Baby Graysons are taking over Britain (sort of)

Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories

Baby name statistics for 2018 in England and Wales have been released, and it’s mostly the same old story: Oliver, Olivia, as Mr Bumble almost once sang. Much has been made of the growing popularity of names shared with the hipster hoodlums from the BBC series Peaky Blinders – with Arthur, Tommy and Ada shooting up the tables. And then there is Harper, up 1,365 places in the girls’ rankings since 2008 – which is a Beckham thing, apparently.

But Rakewell is cheered to see that artists are making their mark, too, with Grayson up 26 places year on year in the boys’ list, and 905 places since 2008, pushing the name into the top 100 for the first time. There were 742 tiny Graysons delivered in England and Wales in 2018 – a legion of little potters, Rakewell hopes.

All patronymic power to Grayson Perry, then. But bad news for his alter ego, Claire – the name, second only to Sarah in the mid ’70s, hasn’t appeared on the top 100 girls’ names since 1996.

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