London House Histories

London doss-houses
A Chelsea house I researched recently was used as a 6d-a-night doss-house from 1890, combined with the house next door. The 1891 census recorded 99 men lodging there and similar numbers ten years later. One of the lodgers was the aptly-named Samuel Rook, whose occupation was listed as 'thief'.
Common lodging houses or doss-houses were notorious for their over-crowding. The lodgers often dispensed with bed linen, if there was any, to escape vermin. The d...aily fee bought a bed, or in many cases a share of a bed. Some establishments operated a two-relay system where a bed was occupied by one person during the day and another at night. In some cases a three-relay system shared a bed in eight-hour shifts. Another practice, to save space and beds, was rope-sleeping, as in the image above.
The American author Jack London, disguised as a stranded sailor on a research trip to London in 1902 described the horrors he encountered at a doss-house: 'The entrance was by way of a flight of steps descending from the sidewalk to what was properly the cellar of the building. Here were two large and gloomily lighted rooms, in which men cooked and ate. I had intended to do some cooking myself, but the smell of the place stole away my appetite, or, rather wrested it from me; so I contented myself watching other men cook and eat. One workman, home from work, sat down opposite me at the rough wooden table, and began his meal. A handful of salt on the not over-clean table constituted his butter. Into it he dipped his bread, mouthful by mouthful, and washed it down with tea from a big mug. A piece of fish completed his bill of fare. He ate silently, looking neither to right nor left nor across at me...I ventured to the range where the men were cooking. But the smell I had noticed on entering was stronger here, and a rising nausea drove me into the street for fresh air.'
In 1894 the licensing and inspection of London doss-houses passed from the police to the London County Council, which in 1902 obtained additional powers. The appointment of doss-house managers was subject to official approval, inspections could be made in the middle of the night, and improvements were made in sanitation, ventilation and the minimum space required for each bed. Painting of interiors rather than white-liming was introduced to reduce vermin, and sheet-changing once a month was no longer permitted.
See More

Researched an interesting house in Wimpole Street once owned by Dr. Richard Asher. Paul McCartney spent about 3 years living in a room at the top of the house when he first started dating Jane. Many of the Beatles' hits were written there including Yellow Submarine, I Want to Hold Your Hand and the most recorded song in history - Yesterday. Eleanor Rigby was written in the music room in the basement with John Lennon on a pedal organ and McCartney on a piano - writing 'eyeball to eyeball'.
McCartney avoided his fans by climbing out of his bedroom window on to a foot-wide parapet four storeys above the street, entering the next-door house through a window - courtesy of the neighbours - and exiting via the basement flat to the mews behind.

https://audioboom.com/…/5395753-do-you- know-your-house-hist…

Stuck for present ideas - how about a bespoke London house history? A personalised gift certificate can be sent in plenty of time for Christmas Day. Contact me at: www.londonhousehistories.co.uk

Witches' marks
A symbol like this one was scorched into the staircase timber of an early Georgian house I've just researched in Hampstead. The symbols, also known as apotropaic marks, most commonly took the form of a 'Daisy Wheel' which was drawn with a compass in a single endless line which was meant to confuse and entrap evil spirits. The patterns include flower-like designs, pentangles and tangles of lines to flummox spirits that attempted to follow them. These witches'... marks can be found on houses, churches and barns built between about 1550 and 1750 - often near an entry point of the building or the staircase down to the kitchen. The marks were thought to offer protection and coincide with a period when belief in witchcraft and the supernatural was widespread. Interiors lit by tallow candles would have been eerily dark once night fell.
See More

Excavation for the Metropolitan District Railway in Tothill Street c.1866. A layer of peat over 2 metres thick was packed along the south wall of the tunnel to reduce vibrations to avoid damage to Westminster Abbey.

From 1860 James Hedderley started to haul 50 lbs of complicated equipment round Chelsea leaving a fascinating photographic record. Here's Cheyne Walk pre-Embankment days - the fence marks the river's bank.

An early resident of a house I have just researched in Kensington was Ernest Jones, one of the most prominent figures in the Chartist movement in the 1840s and 1850s. His speeches, in which he openly advocated physical force, led to his prosecution, and he was sentenced in 1848 to two years' imprisonment for seditious speeches. He knew Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels personally.
A further fact about Ernest Jones is that he didn't always pay his fishmonger - this was extremel...y lucky as it happens and was the only clue to his identity when I was researching his Kensington home. Entries in the rate books and directories of an 'Ernest Jones' provided little guidance and the family was unluckily away at the time of the census. It was only when I chanced upon an article in the press about an argument between Jones and his fishmonger that everything fell into place. This is why house historians are often called 'house detectives'!
See More

Writers invariably describe their home and surroundings in an evocative way - this is immensely helpful to house historians and I am always delighted to find that a novelist has lived in a house I am researching!
E.M. Delafield lived in a flat above her literary agent's offices just off the Strand during the autumn of 1939. Her largely autobiographical 'The Provincial Lady in Wartime' (1940) describes the house and brilliantly captures the mix of apprehension, confusion and ...plain boredom which made the first months of the Second World War so trying.
Delafield worked as a volunteer canteen helper at the Adelphi ARP Station. The passages describing this establishment with its motley staff and customers during the phoney war, with food still plentiful and no urgent incidents to deal with, carry the ring of authenticity: 'Trousered women are standing and walking about in every direction, and a great many men with armlets... Rather disquieting notice indicates directions to be taken by Decontaminated Women, Walking Cases, Stretcher-bearers and others... Atmosphere thick with smoke and no apparent ventilation.'
See More

Looking at the occupants of a single house can open up much wider events in the past – it’s micro personalised history with which we can identify. During the First World War a resident of a Connaught Square house I am researching travelled continuously on behalf of the Army Remount Service to buy horses as remounts in the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. These buyers had to have a good deal of equine experience so as not to be conned into buying 'duds'. 3 million horses were engaged in the war by 1915; however it was estimated that the average life of a horse on the firing line in Belgium and France was about ten days.

Pimlico's social aspirations disappeared overnight after the opening of Victoria Station in 1860 and parts of the immediate area became quite seedy. I have just researched a house built c1856 in a street identified by the social researcher Henry Mayhew in 1852 as where an affluent man might seek a discreet introduction to the sort of 'quiet lady whose secrecy he can rely upon'. He noted that everyone knew that the street was inhabited by 'beauty that ridicules decorum'. The house was used for immoral purposes for about twenty years during this period. In this and nearby streets, one house in three was said to be a brothel. Two rather unusual brothers lived up the road who claimed to be the grandsons of Bonnie Prince Charlie, styling themselves Prince Sobieski and Count d'Albanie.

I have just been researching a property in Belgravia, which Lady Conyngham used as her London house for a short period from 1859. She was George IV's last mistress from about 1820 until his death ten years later. In her youth she had been a great beauty, but by the time she was the King's mistress she was 51 and rather fat. Caricaturists and wits found the idea of the fat ageing King and his large ageing mistress hilarious and the King's behaviour in public fed their humou...r. He became besotted with her and even during his Coronation he was seen 'nodding and winking at her'. Society believed that after his death she went to Paris with 'wagonloads of plunder' but although the King had bequeathed her all his plate and jewels, she refused the entire legacy. By the time she lived at this house in Belgravia she was ninety. She died aged ninety-two, having outlived her husband by thirty years and all but one of her children.
See More

On the subject of gruesome events, a former occupant of our house in Westminster was a key witness at the trial of the last man in British history to be hanged, drawn and quartered (in 1782). David Tyrie was a Scots clerk at a Portsmouth naval office who had been caught in treacherous correspondence with the French. He lacked political pull and the means to shop his confederates, so was accused of treason. His public execution on Southsea Common attracted a mob of 100,000 people, and was gruesomely bungled. After his burial on the seashore some sailors dug up the coffin and cut the body into 'a thousand pieces', according to a contemporary account, to keep as souvenirs.
House history can certainly bring the past alive!

"A CRIME MORE REVOLTING IN ITS DETAILS THAN ANY WHICH HAS BEEN PERPETRATED IN THIS COUNTRY OF LATE YEARS"
This was just one of the lurid headlines reporting on a double murder which took place in a quiet Chelsea square in May 1870. The sensational story reads like the plot of an Agatha Christie novel - an elderly clergyman from Jersey was killed with a blow to the head with a heavy shovel and hidden in a drain in his house, in a hole specially opened for the purpose. His ho...usekeeper was found strangled and squashed into a large box, which subsequently started seeping blood, giving the game away. The murderer was the plasterer who when caught was wearing the victim's clothes, had a quantity of cash in his pocket and also the blood-stained deeds to the house. Oh yes, and purporting to be the dead man's nephew, with a fake French accent and beard. Copious details follow in later articles, including descriptions of the murderer having to be taken to the gallows tied to a chair.
I stumbled across this rather gripping story when researching a house in Chelsea recently. The house is not the same one where the murders took place, but the question is, what if it had been? Do you think the present owners of a house with such a macabre past would want to know?
See More

We are told nowadays that women shouldn't postpone having children until their late thirties and forties, and that this seldom happened in the past. Not so! Time and time again doing research I have found instances of women producing healthy babies well beyond the age of 38 and into their late forties - not just the last of a string of 10, but the first. In the 1820s an ancestor of mine, as it happens, had 4 boys (none less than 6 ft 2 or so!) only starting at the age of 37.

Something I find very interesting whilst doing research is that rags and riches so frequently eye each other in the same district, often the same street. One example is 18th and 19th century Westminster, where the seat of government is set beside Dickens' 'Devil's Acre', a haven for felons and thieves. A house I am researching in Portland Road at the moment throws into stark relief the contrast at the time the street was built between the wealth of Notting Hill on one side, and Notting Dale with its piggeries and potteries on the other. By the end of the 19th century Notting Dale became one of London's worst slums.