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.

Our house is pretty recent. However, I discovered last year that formerly there had been a (locally) notorious murder on the site, and the building pulled down and these houses built instead.
It's a really nice place to live and knowing that doesn't change how I feel about this house.

There was a large manor house in this area which had a chunk of land with it, it was a market garden. The owners also bred dachshunds and they sold off the land as they got older. Part of it is now a recreation ground and where I live was part of an orchard.

In the fifties a couple of men and their wives bought a plot of land and built 2 matching bungalows, designed and built them between them, then brought their families up here.

I bought this from one of the men who had gone into a nursing home in his 80's. It's a solid well built house, has a lovely feel, well proportioned rooms, higher than normal ceilings and lovely soil in the garden. Only 60 years old yet has more character than newer houses I have lived in.

Sadly the manor house is gone, with sheltered apartments built where it was but surrounded by the old trees. The stone built caretakers cottage remains.

I looked mine up on the 1911 census and the family had come from a street 8 miles away in another town that I had desperately wanted to buy in (looked them up on the 1901 census). It's a miners house so I guess they came to work in the mine.

Mine is a 1930s semi.
The head electrician who help build the estate bought it in 1934 from the developer. He sold it to a newly married couple in 1955.
The husband died in the 1990s but we bought it from the wife in 2012, she was 93 and going into a care home and the house was sold to pay for it
So we are only the 3rd family to live here, not bad for an 80 year old house!

Unfortunately not a lot as yet, although we do plan to do some research at the local archives.

Our current (Victorian) detached house was extended in Arts & Crafts style in 1924. On the upstairs landing (a large enough area to be used as our office) in the 'new' extension there is an original large engraved stone plaque set into the wall commemorating the fact that a grandfather built the house in 1853 for his grandson. It is a lovely feature and I would love to find out something about their family.

I do know it is one of the earliest houses in the area.

The house is quite unusual in that it is built into an escarpment with only three tiny windows on the 'front' elevation with the remaining seventeen overlooking the garden. Over three floors, the lower two are subterranean on one side whilst the other side is bright with all those windows and lots of doors facing South.

Apparently there were once sand quarries/pits on the land further down the hill beneath our garden and we have some unusual brick arches built into the hillside. These are large enough to stand in, but I'm not sure of their original purpose.....it would be interesting to find out.

Like a previous poster, our house was built with the front door facing what is now the 'garden front' away from the lane, which is a later addition. Originally - according to the EA who is a bit of an authority on local architecture - the house was approached via a long sweeping driveway from lower down the hill. A large portion of that driveway and garden was sold off - during the 1970s if the houses built on the land are anything to go by - and entry is now gained on the opposite side via a gate built into the wall of the house itself. Our garden retains a small wooded area which you can see was intended to be much larger as some of the more recent houses have very mature trees - including an amazing monkey puzzle tree - in their back gardens.....these obviously were once in 'our' garden......grrrr!

We were hoping to find out more from the deeds when we purchased in December - our last (Georgian) house came with lots of original documents, indentures etc - but when our solicitor sent the paperwork through we were disappointed to discover the old stuff had been destroyed and apart from the Land Reg bits, all we got were some boring documents from the 1980s relating to drains etc.....

My house is 1930's and on a typical 1930's estate. It was built as a home for the builder of the whole street and is bigger than the other houses he built and in a completely different style to the rest of the street.

We are lucky in that the lady who lived in our house for 40 years still comes back to visit our neighbour and takes a keen interest in how we are getting on in the house.

She has told us that during the war the Army requisitioned the house and moved soldiers in - we live very close to the Thames so there were a lot of troops stationed around our town to protect from an invasion along the river.

She was also really surprised to see the lovely stained glass windows in the internal doors as they were completely covered in plywood when she moved in and she never thought to find out what was underneath.

One day a lady turned up at the door and told us that she was the niece of this lady and that as a child she used to spend every summer holiday with her aunt. She had really fond memories of a tree in the back garden and said that she was really interested to know if it was still there. Sadly we had to tell her that the tree had been cut down by the previous owners to make way for an extension but we invited her into the garden for a look around and then gave her a tour of the house. She was so grateful.

When I next saw her aunt she told me that her niece had recently tragically lost her son and as part of some grief therapy had been told to revisit all of her happy places and this was why she had come to see the house.It had apparently made her day to be invited in.

Raphaella your house sounds fantastic!

3 brothers owned a building firm and decided to build and live in almost identically laid out homes right next to each other, built in 1994. They soon fell out & all moved away.

We live in the middle house & very occasionally still get post for the original builders/owners. The original Mrs. of our house once pulled her car up and asked about the hedge, she had worked very hard to get it established (we promptly ripped out it was kinda ugly).

Ours was originally a coach house. Very grand title for a b and b! Then Scottish Electric owned it for a while. It was converted into 2 flats in the early forties. Didn't really ever seem to have families living in it. I spent a very pleasant morning in our local library archives finding out what I could. It's a great house with a lovely feel to it.

The city where we live was/is crammed full of tourists since the Georgian times, so we can look at street directories to see who lived in our house. I must do this properly one day. There seemed to be a bit of movement of widows between houses in the immediate vicinity.

I'd hate the comparative poverty/hard lives but, if I were given Aladdin's lamp, I would love to go back in time to see all the families that lived here.

We have (had) very dark green paint above the dado and brown beneath in our hallway. It must have been sooo dark!

MrsMarigold, you said you used the census to see who lived there previously. Can I ask how you do that?
All the census websites I have looked at only let you search for a person, not an address.
I would love to find out the history of my house, but don't know how to start. I only know the year it was build in.

kojacks I know you didn't ask me but I used ancestry.com as I think the 1911 gave me the option to search by address.

Thanks, my house is inter war, about 1938. I didn't realise you could only search the census from 100+ years ago.

So I'll have to wait until 2040 to use that source of local history!

Yeah although I'm sure the 1911 one came out prior to 2011.... But I guess it's a data protection thing as not many people will be around from 100 years ago.

My house was built in the 1850s. My next door neighbour was born in our house and has lived next door since she was married. She is now in her eighties. When we moved in 10 years ago she and her husband talked us through the history of the house including one elderly resident who died in the house and wasn't discovered for a few weeks (nice!) and that it was later owned by a dominatrix who had various chains attached to the wall for the entertainment of clients.

There are often fb pages for local history. Worth a look.

The houses on our street were built in the 1920s. Our elderly next-door neighbour inherited his from his parents, who bought it new.

Not sure we'll be sticking around quite that long...

Our house is younger than I am. But I know who built it, what was here before, about the gift of 3 ft of land from next door when the oil tank went & in the names of both families that owned it before us.
When we moved in we were given a huge bundle of paperwork about the house, including the planning permission drawings and sales particulars from each time it has changed hands.
Sometimes I tell people we live in Mrs A's old house as this village has no road names or house numbers and our house name is similar to a few others locally.