WHEN in the 1990s I first moved to London I used to wander around Spitalfields amazed that there were still streets of tall Georgian houses boarded up and neglected within a stone’s throw of Bishopsgate and the City of London. When I heard that one was coming up for sale I knew that I had to have it. And so began a labour of love that’s taken me the best part of a decade — interspersed with the restoration of a house I bought in Whitechapel that was described in Bricks and Mortar in September last year.

I’ve always been fascinated by derelict houses. As a boy I used to creep into a Victorian mansion opposite my primary school in Glasgow. Two old ladies had lived there, dying within months of one another and leaving the building to distant, unappreciative relatives. The kitchen was as it would have been in the 1930s, with a mangle, iron pots and pans, and a huge pine dresser. Although most of the furniture in the rest of the house had been sold, the billiards table lay dusty and abandoned and, excitingly for a ten-year-old lad, a vintage car sat in the garage rusting on its haunches. All perfect apart from one insurmountable obstacle: my parents steadfastly refused to move in and squat even when the demolition bulldozers were circling.

I swore that one day I’d buy my own wreck and rescue it. Fortunately the bank that owned the 1722 Huguenot silkweaver’s house that I spotted was as enthusiastic about rubble as my parents had been and I persuaded them to part with it for a pittance in 1995. That’s when the real work began. The basement was flooded and the attic rooms were damp and rotten. But I suspected that the three floors in between contained hidden treasures — and they did.

Beneath layers of plywood and metal sheeting lay the original Georgian panels. The ceilings had been lowered but the grand wooden cornicing was intact. Doors remained in situ, missing only locks and handles. And the fireplaces opened to revealrusty butstillserviceable hob grates. I was in dereliction heaven.

With little money to spend, my partner and I did all the clearing ourselves. As old lime ceilings collapsed, the history of the house and its occupants fell into our hands: a wedding ring, Georgian coins freshlyminted, handmade children’s toys, the culinary history of the house told in shells and bones. And buttons — hundreds of them — from three centuries of sewing: silver and amber, horn and jet, bakelite and cloth.

Poverty had saved the house. Once the grand home of French Protestant merchants, it had fallen — like Spitalfields itself — upon hard times in the 19th and 20th centuries. Whereas wealthier neighbourhoods would have had features ripped out as fashions changed, Spitalfields interiors were covered over, the rooms becoming smaller in the process. I had unlocked an architectural Russian doll. My predecessor in the house had died before the First World War and it had never been wired or plumbed. Cooking had last been done over an open fire in the basement. The house had been used for decades as storage for the garment sweatshop trade.

But after stripping the house to its elegant bare bones I had to decide how to dress it. And there was no shortage of advice. But how much should I do? I wasn’t the first person to face the dilemma: restore back to the original or try to conserve what was there. It’s an ongoing debate for those who buy neglected old houses.

One of the first people I made friends with was Dennis Severs, an American Anglophile who had restored his building in nearby Folgate Street with a purist’s eye for detail and a showman’s taste. His house — now a museum — was a work of art but for me it didn’t seem to have the comfort of a home. Under the restoration ethic that he champions, houses should be taken back as nearly as possible to their original state. Drab colours are matched against surviving patches of the original, collapsing lime plaster ceilings are pinned back in place, and contemporary kitchen appliances, if they are bought at all, tend to be hidden like electrical porn, a guilty secret to be enjoyed in private.

The conservationists, who generally want to keep things as they are and to preserve each change in a building’s history, did battle with the restorers over my front façade. On the one side was English Heritage and on other Tower Hamlets council. The issue was whether I should have a housefront or a shopfront. For the first hundred years of its life my building would have had an entirely domestic façade. But in the 1820s the ground floor had a shopfront fitted. Had it survived there would have been no debate. But although old photographs showed how elegant the Regency shopfront had been, by the mid-1990s it had largely been destroyed. Tower Hamlets wanted it reinstated. English Heritage wanted a brick façade. In the end I took the latter’s advice and went back to the 1720s.

In general I found myself more in the conservation camp. I wanted to keep all that I’d found that was original. But unlike the Georgians I did have the option of running water, overhead lighting, and a cooker. So I opted for restored panelling but 20th-century furniture, open fires but central heating, renovated flagstones but a stainless-steel kitchen.

I hope that the end result is a house that Georgian craftsmen would have built had they had access to contemporary technology. Who knows, perhaps they, like me, might even sometimes have switched on the telly in the drawing room without being entirely consumed by shame.

Dennis Severs’s house, 18 Folgate Street, Spitalfields, www.dennissevershouse.co.uk

Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, 37 Spital Square, London E1, www.spab.org.uk

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