When I was growing up, we sometimes used to stay with a great aunt, who lived in an old thatched cottage in a small village in East Anglia. The village was near an old Roman road and at that time, in the 1970s, the landscape around the village was almost denuded of trees, its history obliterated as old hedgerows were cut down and fields increased in size. The cottage itself was one-up, and one-down, with a lean-to at the back and a bathroom added at the side sometime in the 50s or 60s. The walls of the original structure were still made of wattle and daub on a timber frame: it was indeed a house through time – across centuries and generations.
In the course of building work, my aunt discovered a great Tudor inglenook behind the utilitarian 20th century fireplace, with niches at either side where one could sit in winter, when the rest of the room was freezing cold. Upstairs, the bedroom floor still had its original timbers, which had grown uneven over time, so that it was a disorientating experience to walk on them.
The cottage was said to be around five hundred years old, and so hundreds of people must have lived there, untraceable and unknowable. At night, when the fire was dying down and the countryside was quiet, it sometimes felt as though there was a thickness or heaviness in the air, as though the previous generations had left, in some way, a trace of their lives; their unknown and unknowable births, marriages and deaths.
When people move into a brand-new house, they are at the start of a story, but already creating that story. Revisit Your Home makes it possible for families and friends to return to where they used to live in the past, discover more about its story, and add to the richness which the property carries.
In my own house, the title deeds include a handwritten page giving the name of the person who built the house as well as the name of the first occupant, a widower who lived there with his daughter. In the local museum, I found an aerial photograph of the area taken during the 1940s, including my house, clearly showing that the garden at that time was laid out like an allotment, with a path down the middle and beds for vegetables on either side. The garden soil has always been very rich, so I am profiting from the tillage of previous generations. I sometimes think of what life must have been life for people who were living in that house at key moments in history, such as the declaration of two World Wars.
Revisiting a home serves as a reminder that living in a particular place entails a beginning and an end; a welcome and a beginning; happiness mixed with sadness.
The BBC series ‘A House Through Time’, which starts this week, focuses on an 18th house in Bristol, near the old harbour, which was the home of several sea captains involved in the slave trade, one of whom was captured by pirates. At different times, a foundling orphan was left out on the steps, a black servant ran away, possibly to become a pirate, and John Wesley preached the evils of slavery in a nearby chapel. Well-worth watching.