The original purchase price of Barker’s home was £690, a considerable sum at the time, and it was bought from Cubitt in 1829 by a John Bumpstead.
Using the census, contemporary directories and other archival material, Barker has found the names of many past occupants, including doctors, surgeons and merchants, who often had extended families living with them, or dependent mothers and unmarried sisters, and servants.
He hopes to research as many of their stories as he can; one he has already uncovered is that of a Belgian nurse, Aida Hollmeir, who lived in the house in 1916. Married to a German, who was interned at the start of the first world war, she had been forced to leave England, but sneaked back into the country using false papers.
She was caught, charged and convicted of illegal entry; newspapers reported on May 26, 1916, that her sentence was two months’ jail, then internment for the rest of the war.
So how do you go about researching your home’s history? Books on the subject are appearing — mine is out next month — and the thirst has sparked television programmes, such as the History Channel’s Hidden House History.
Many archives, local studies libraries and local authority websites have leaflets on tracing the history of houses in their catchment areas. These give general advice and pinpoint specialist local resources. Many London archives, for example, have records showing which streets were renumbered and renamed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Curiosity about the date of a building and reason for alterations and extensions is often why people first become interested in tracing their home’s past. Architectural history stops being a dry, academic subject when applied to dating the cornice around your own front door.
Did you know, for example, that your home’s windows can shed light on the building’s age? Sash windows (with weighted panels that slide up and down) were perfected in 1670s London. They replaced older casement windows (opening sideways on hinges), though these have been revived for cottage-style Arts and Crafts homes, modernist dwellings and, strangely enough, council houses.
Variations in the colour of bricks identify alterations and extensions. Steep, tiled roofs, sloped at 45 degrees or more, often indicate they were originally thatched, because straw needs a sharp incline to allow rainwater to drain away.
Old fruit trees in the gardens of newer houses may be legacies of a more verdant past, when the plot was part of the grounds of a long-since demolished mansion, perhaps, or of a rural orchard. Addresses, too, reveal astonishing changes: Green Lanes in north London is anything but green now, but must have been once. Dover Street, Canterbury, is a quiet residential street but its old name, Rithercheap, reveals that it was the city’s medieval cattle market.
Home history leads into local history, too. Histories of most areas are available in local archives and libraries. These paint the background to your home’s own story, and often help explain why it is there at all. Baker’s terraced house in Stoke Newington, for example, and the rows of terraces surrounding it, owes much to the development of railways in the early 19th century that allowed the white-collar clerks of Victorian London to commute to work.
The names of past occupants can be found by examining old records. These can reveal much about the building itself. More compellingly, they open doors on the lives of otherwise forgotten souls: people who used “our” addresses as their own. Who looked out of “our” windows. Who planted the shrubs in “our” gardens. People with whom, simply by virtue of where we live, we have a surprising amount in common.
Deeds and other land transfer records at the Land Registry, or ferreted away by solicitors and mortgage providers, help not only to date homes, but to tell us more about their former occupants. In local archives, many more records fill out the story. These include street directories, electoral registers and censuses. Stretching back in a 10-yearly sequence from 1901 to 1841, censuses provide detailed records of the families who occupied older homes, listed person-by-person, detailing their relationships to one another, occupations, places of birth and even their disabilities.
Combined with birth, marriage and death records, they reveal the dramas of our Victorian predecessors’ lives — deaths in childbirth, injuries at work, young soldiers setting forth from our front doors to fight in India and South Africa, some returning, others not.
Another source is old maps. As well as Ordnance Survey maps, there are ones relating to tithes, railways, planning, poverty and alcoholism, enclosure of farmland and much more. Some date back to when each county was depicted in splendid isolation amid ornate borders, emblazoned with the coats of arms of the principal inhabitants.
Dean Bubier, a schoolteacher, knew that his house, in the old part of Canterbury, was at most 200 years old. Using lists of medieval rent payers, local archivists have reconstructed plans of the old city back to 1200. These revealed that Bubier’s house stands on what was the garden of a bakery belonging to a prominent local citizen, Meiner the Rich.
And from archaeological reports, it turns out that just round the corner stood a Christian church dating back to the late Roman period. Not a bad pedigree for a Victorian terrace. Mind you, that pales into insignificance compared to the houses in Maidstone, Kent, near a quarry where, in 1834, they unearthed the fossil of an iguanodon that had terrorised the area 1.3m years earlier.
While researching my book, I made an extraordinary discovery of my own. From the window of my local pub, the Rose & Crown in Stoke Newington, you can see the car park of the former council offices. Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the house demolished to make way for it had once belonged to my great-great-great grandfather. But that is typical of the surprising links that emerge, between history and buildings, places and people, when you start investigating the history of your home.
© Anthony Adolph 2006
Tracing Your Home’s History is published by Collins on September 4 at £20. Copies are available for £18 with free delivery from The Sunday Times BooksFirst, 0870 165 8585
