The first thing people ask when they hear that I work on A House Through Time is, ‘how do you find the house?’ The series tells the story of one single home over four episodes, so finding a property with that much history is the most difficult task of the whole production.
For the current series (beginning Monday 8 April) we began searching for a house way back in February 2018. We’d been steered towards Newcastle upon Tyne by our presenter David Olusoga. He grew up on Tyneside, and knew the city - with its history of manufacturing, mining and shipbuilding - would have some interesting houses. Having identified the streets in Newcastle where we might find historic houses (two hundred years old, or more), we shoved dozens of flyers through letterboxes and waited for a response. In the end around a dozen homeowners were willing to take part.
Then the real hard work begins
My team had to research each house in turn to identify which ones had the best histories. This meant weeks of work: doing online searches of censuses, directories and newspaper reports, and visiting archives to find maps, surveys, electoral rolls and photos. It’s incredibly painstaking, frustrating, sometimes disheartening work.
The end result was a timeline of residents for each house, detailing the big moments in their lives (births, deaths, marriages, scandals, crimes and intrigues) starting from the present occupiers and stretching far back in time to the year the house was built.
A whole world of stories
Early on in the process we realised that the area of Summerhill, just to the west of the city centre, had loads of great stories behind its front doors. Many of the residents were Quakers, and took an active role in social causes: Temperance, the Abolition of Slavery, Women’s Suffrage. One of the houses had briefly been home to Frederick Douglass, who’d escaped from slavery in America and come to England to campaign for abolition.
The Twentieth Century stories weren’t short on drama either. We often struggle with more recent stories. We’re a history programme not a property show, and stories from recent decades - the 80s, 90s and early 00s - can often feel familiar and prosaic. They’re just too close to our own experience to make good telly. But this wasn’t true of the houses in Summerhill. After being quite a posh area, the area was earmarked for demolition in the ‘60s. Although it was eventually saved, the recession took its toll on the neighbourhood and by the ‘80s the houses were in serious decline. According to one resident, his house had been a ‘doss house and drug den’. Another was set on fire on the same day the owners moved in!
The biggest enemy of our research teams is stability. If one family has lived in their home for several decades, and lived happy and uneventful lives, then that house gets crossed off the list!
Picking the house
After three months of intense work we’d whittled the list down to a shortlist of three houses, and eventually settled on 5 Ravensworth Terrace. Now it’s all done, I think everyone is proud of the series. The residents of this house lived the most extraordinary lives and their stories are funny, entertaining, shocking and moving.
For a history nerd, a job on A House Through Time is as good as it gets. We get to hear the voices of people in the past and explore their lives in amazing detail. Sometimes they feel close enough to touch.
Watch A House Through Time on Monday 8 April at 9pm on 主播大秀 Two and 主播大秀 iPlayer.