What do you know about the history of your house?

[MrsMarigold]

We live in London in a Victorian terrace - the house has had quite a colourful history, I gather from what I glean online it was pretty much derelict in the mid 1990s. Since then it has had two owners, then us.

Today a man approached me outside and asked me if we ever see anyone in the drawing room, a woman in a long dress stoking the fire. I've never seen anyone but apparently some of the previous inhabitants' children have seen her. I'm quite intrigued. He told me his wife worked as a nanny here in the 90s so that's how he knew.

On the national census I can see some goldsmiths lived here 1911 but I would love to know more. I also found some old receipts from the 1940s in the cellar for pork and duck from Fortnum & Mason. We also found a newspaper from the time of the falklands in the back of one of the cupboards.

Please share your stories I love this sort of thing.

You might be one of the streets on Booths map of London. This classifies roads in the late Victorian according to the class of people who lived there. The lowest roads are purple (criminal classes) as I recall but it is amazing how lowly ranked streets are very close to highly ranked ones. The BBC did a whole series looking into the history of the streets they chose based on these maps. It is online and it is a brilliant resource.

In London there is also a bomb map for WW2. We have looked up the road where we have a flat in London. A bomb dropped right next to us which is why there is now a playground and wildlife area. The houses were never rebuilt.

I know quite a lot about my own house because the owners have been well documented as have all the changes. It was built in about 1835 as a woodman's cottage for a very large estate and it was just a one up, one down with a ladder staircase in the corner and an earth floor with, eventually, an oven built into the chimney. It was sold when the estate was broken up in 1912. There is a similar reconstructed cottage in the open air museum near to us so we know exactly what it would have looked like throughout the Victorian era. At the museum it is described as a "hovel". Our hovel is now just our dining room!

Our house is somewhere in the region of 400 years old (it's had bits built on at various times and we don't know very much about the sequence of the alterations, annoyingly).

I've found it in censuses back to the 1850's when a woman was living there with her 80-something mother. Gives me a bit of a shiver to realise the mother was born in the 18th century, athough I guess several generations had been there before that.

From other censuses I've found that a farming family lived here in the later 19th c and all the daughters were employed making straw-plait - it's an agricultural area and that was the main source of extra income; little children started learning to make it as soon as they could.

I'd love to find out more but even a trip to the County Record Office didn't dig up much info. There just don't seem to be enough surviving documents.

It is fascinating though.

My house is a converted outbuilding which sits on farmland previously belonging to the The Marquess of Ailsa who is the Clan Chief of Clan Kennedy. The hill that it sits on was previously occupied by branches of the Kennedy family who built forts there to guard the land in the late 14th century. The family eventually built two castles in the area but the first grand house they tried to build was abandoned as it was being built on fairy land. The fairies pulled the stonework down every night and eventually the family gave up and the land was left to the fairies again. The story is referenced in a Robert Burns poem I think. I love a house with a past!

I know a lot about ours as last year the solicitors gave us the deeds of our house..... A huge pile of info detailing everything from the original indenture from the purchase of the plot 1870 & the original mortgage £500 to details of every single purchase & mortgage since. Absolutely fascinating. There are maps in the pile too that chart the changes in the village since then.

Our last home was built about 1650 and was a beautiful thatched cottage. It had wonderful beams, some of which were numbered with roman numerals. It used to be 2 cottages, both 1 up, 1down, with a fireplace. It had no foundations and was wattle & daub construction. Some of the horsehair still poked through the plaster in places. They used to tie the first layer of thatch on with woven rope, some of it was still in place in our bedroom round the beams. There was a great fire in the village during the late 1600's, our was one of only 2 houses that survived. I loved it there. I'm sure there was a ghost but never felt uneasy

Current house is 6 months old...

I love that story IfYouWere

We've recently moved to a 110-year-old house and have had a letter saying there's evidence it's built on the site of a medieval manor house. Money's been raised for a community archeological dig in April.

My boys are so excited about the gold they'll be digging up .

As for the house, I want to know why previous residents painted the walls with dark green and black gloss paint before papering it with the most hideous vinyl wallpaper. Unfortunately, the interesting-looking pencilled scribbles underneath the wallpaper in one bedroom can't be deciphered, apart from the word "brownies".

No ghost-stories to be had here, thank god!

I'm so jealous! My house was only built 1930; still, I'd love to know more about it. Any tips?

Our house is Victorian (technically Edwardian: 1902), and one of the rum things about it is that we're the first on the [residential, off a main road] street, yet our house number is 5. We're a fully-detached, yet in configuration we're just like a RH-half of all of he semi-detached on the street. So, that makes us wonder if our building didn't used to be a "whole" building and after (probably) a bomb the other part might have been the other half-of-house.

That said, on that side is an alley-way to a large plot out back. I might be wrong, but that can't be "new"?

Something we've been told by locals is that our immediate area used to be a bit of a Theatre Area in the era. I think that's cool.

How does one find out about old things?

Our house is a converted barn. Not too sure how old it is, 100 years or more. It's not listed but was on the first ever ordinance survey map of the area.
I know that it has been a farm, a blacksmiths, a car repair garage and a potato packing station, a chicken shed, pigeon loft, horse stables and now a house. The horses used to sleep in our bedroom!
It's lovely, we tried not to change much of it so if there was an opening we put glass there and didn't change the exterior at all, just pointed it up. We've left iron fittings in the walls, worn away corner stones where horses have rubbed them, original gates attached to it etc.

Our house was built in the 1900s it was the middle of a long terrace but is now the end house due to the other houses being destroyed by bombing in WW2. It leans considerably and would have been demolished had the owners not pleaded to keep it standing. The air raid warden was killed right outside our house as he ran for cover after sounding the alarm. Makes you realise how lucky you are really.

My house is the most modern I've ever loved in, and I think the only one to be younger than me. However it has an interesting little story in that it, and the two others on the site, were built as shells before the developer went bankrupt. The houses then stood empty for a few years before someone bought them and finished them off ... when our neighbour told us this, all the quirks of the construction and fittings made a bit more sense!

More interesting is the literary history in the area. We're very close to Cecil Day Lewis's cottage, where he hung out being poetic with W H Auden, two of Robert Burns' granddaughters are buried in the local churchyard, and a little further away is Alice Liddell's grandparents' house, which apparently still contains the mirror which Alice's famous namesake went through in Alice Through The Looking Glass.

LIVED in, grr.

Similar to cakebaby, the main part of our house was built in 1620. It was originally thatched & remnants of the thatched roof are still in the loft. It has no foundations and still loads of wattle & daub.

The beams in my son's room are carved with Roman numerals and we have a huge inglenook in our sitting room.

(No ghosts, but I don't believe in them anyway).

I wish we knew stuff about our house, but we don't. It does seem incredible to think that James I was king when it was built.

I know the people who owned the house before us divorced.

When we took out the kitchen I found an anniversary card the husband had written to the wife (it was with the envelope, but not in it) - he must have shoved it on top of the cupboard and never given it to her.

I also get a niche type of junk mail addressed to someone with a very unusual name, famous enough to be on Wiki, but my Googling suggests they never lived in this town. I wonder if they stayed here for a while- the (very boring) junk mail would be specific to their career.

And I think this must have once been farmland because our garden goes up and down like a field. It drives DH mad - he wants to flatten it, but I like it.

DH tells me there was "market garden" here....I'd never heard of a market garden, but apparently they grew apples, which is why we, and all the neighbours, have several apple trees in their gardens.

If you want to find out more about a village or town, there might be a local history society or books on the area. We too have the deeds of our house and even more (a filing cabinet full) of papers about our fields. Old maps are also quite useful.

Our house is new and built on what was a farmyard in the village that my DFil grew up in. He can remember the farmyard, and the house, and the family that lived here. He used to hunt rabbits in our garden, it used to be part of the meadow, and whenever we do any serious gardening we always find brick rubble. Apparently there used to be barns here. I wish they'd converted one!

In danger of outing myself here but my house was built in the early 1900's by a very famous architect as a dairy in the grounds of a stately home. The company who did the conversion in the seventies have their offices nearby so they told me all sorts, bit very exciting about the owners. The estate has since been broken up into a private school and homes. It's so lovely, makes me smile every morning when I open my bedroom curtains

Not very exciting I mean.

365, your dcs may not find gold but they could well dig up some old clay pipes, at the very least. You can barely put a spade into our garden without unearthing bits of stem and broken bowls. They must have smoked themselves stupid with the things.

I feel your pain about previous internal decoration choices.....several acres of woodchip came off our walls and ceilings before we re-plastered with lime. Other charming touches included the lid of an old square biscuit tin nailed down as a makeshift repair over some particularly manky floorboards.

In fact I think we're the first people in 400 years to have actually looked after the building

Well I contacted the chap who lived here in the mid-nineties, it was quite easy as he is fairly well known and he was charming. Apparently they bought our house from a developer who had failed to get planning permission to turn it into flats. The developer had bought it from a widow who had divvied it up into 13 bedsits and hadn't decorated anything since the 1960s, (it's a big house but that is pretty staggering). We then ascertained that it hadn't been decorated since 1996 - which explains a lot.

A bomb dropped on our house in WW2 and a seven year old boy died .

That should give our house a sad feeling but it's actually a very happy house. I am a complete coward and have spent many sleepless nights worrying irrationally about ghosts and burglars in other houses I've lived in but I have always felt very safe and comfortable here.

I know it used to be the farmhouse for the biggest farm in the village but most of the land was sold off for building. That is why we have a big yard and garden and outbuildings.
The walls are about two foot thick and I think it was there before the road was, as backs onto the road rather than faces it, iyswim. And it is lower inside than out.
Last week we ripped up the carpet and found lovely quarry tiles.
Would love to get a date of construction.

Risk of totally outing myself....

Ours is a Georgian house. The oldest parts date back to c.1750 but I suspect that some of the beams are even older still (have the look of the 1500s about them).

One of the first commercial manufacturers of bicycles lived here.

It was used as a Youth a hostel during WW2. We have some lovely pictures from that time.

Ours was build in 1759 as an servants house to next door. The cellar is much older than the house. All the paper work is still with the solicitors, dh needs to get it ( he bought the house pre me!). Can't find any pics of the house as they all seem to be taken from just outside it.
Lots of stories about the families that lived either side of us. Dodgy dealings pre and post war!