General Chat

We lived in a maisonette in London......the top two floors of an old London house, built in 1839 it is Grade II listed.......it had elaborate cornices with cherubs......ornate roses and a big white marble fireplace.......the landing window was huge and was stained glass.......it was painted half brown and half cream, or half cream and half green.......it was old, battered......downstairs flat where the landlady lived there was the living room, her bedroom with double doors leading onto the garden, a kitchen a scullery a boot room and the downstairs toilet.......we had a kitchen with a range, one stone sink, one cold tap, a gas cooker on legs.....large living room with two huge sash windows......on the next floor there were two big bedrooms, the front one had two sash windows and the back one had a sash window.....cupboards were built in beside the fireplaces in the bedrooms......

The house was condemned after the war and was held together with 'S' and 'L' shaped iron tie bars to hold the big cracks together, from the bomb damage.......it has been repaired since.....It gave a price for homes in the area, and the one the landlady had owned was worth over £410,000 in the 1990's......it looked a bit seedy when we lived there though....

prior to this house (built mid sixties in what was very pretty woodland apparently) we lived in thatched cottage - prior to us OH's parents owned it - it was originally the village school until about 1890 and was built about mid 18th century which explained the strange layout - the walls were of chalk and flint.

Not much of a history to ours......it is a self-build, built by Fred, the previous owner who was the brickie for the group.....Ron next door was the plasterer, Colin was another builder, and Johnnie who lived behind was the plumber and electrician....

problem was they all used to go off to the local at lunchtimes......and the wives had given them drawings of where they wanted the light switches and plugs.......they got in a muddle, and you would not believe where the switches are in our house.....all over the shop......lol....

btw it was built in the early 70's.....

Hi Maggie hun,


Ours was built in 1860, it was originally a farmhouse with the house next door, the pub outhouse at the back was a barn, it was surrounded by fields, now we have only a teeny backyard!

Some of the walls are really thick and you can see where staircases etc, changed,


Caz xxxxxx

Gosh some of you have some wonderful history to tell about your homes.

I like this thread very much.

Tina xx

In an effort to get OH interested in history (esp. dead rellies) I started investigating our house. I took him to the local archives, showed him photos of our house in the 20's and tried to get him involved in the detective work.

Two years on I know our house was built by Robert Green of Suffolk who moved to Bengeo in the 1850's. He worked as a builder and owned some land. He couldn't afford to build on the land so he let the land to some local gentry to raise cash. With the money raised he built three houses and the gentry received the proceeds for a period of 21 years until 1901 at which point they would return to his ownership.

Unfortunately Robert died in 1900 so at the end of the lease his three daughters inherited a house each. Keturah Green got ours and is found in the Kellys directory as Miss Kate Green. She lived here until 1926.

When we moved in we had the original bakerlite light switches and underneath one I found some Edwardian wallpaper. (I left it in situ) I believe that that is the wallpaper that Kate had put on the walls.

I know who lived here prior to Kate, the Farmer family with their young son Hugh who was born in Chislehurst. His father was a draper from Beckenham and I think his sister was born here before the family left to return to Kent.

There have been many other residents in the years since Kate died. The Morris's, the Warren's, the Emslie's and a couple of others whose names escape me.

Just over a week ago I was helping OH do the front garden when, for the first time in 19 1/2 years I looked at an old drain cover down the side of the house. I'd never read it before but, as bold as anything, written upon it is R Green, Bengeo.

If ever a house was meant to be for someone it was meant for me. Robert Green lived near to some of my rellies in Suffolk and our now redundant coal hole, outside the front door, was made in an iron works in Shoreditch. (I have several ancestors who worked as Iron moulders in Shoreditch)

Our cottage is a listed property built c 1745 to house workers from the local dye mill, all natural dyes and the dye vats are still in situe down the lane and were excavated a few years ago by archiologists from Manchester University. As time went on travelling weavers, some from France were housed in the cottages and Oh found a penny dated1700 when decorating under the stairs. it was bent and he took it to a coin dealer who told us it was a gypsy wedding coin. I traced the resident of this cottage back to 1871 and just five families have lived here including us since then. they are rented and the family who own them inherited them from a spinster lady who also owned most of the villiage, the three sisters who inherited used to collect the rents in the villiage for her and they also inherited the cottages in the village, around 100 to 150 of them, they were able to sell the village property but had to agree that Summerbottom where I live would remain in their family. There are nine cottages with what was a weaving room above seven of them, ours and next door have individual top floors, three storeys in total with loft space above, stone walls and like paving stone roof, original beams and fireplace both excavated by OH when we moved in they had been covered over when someone had tried to "modernise", no back door or back garden just open embankment but ninety foot of garden at front. We love every inch of it.

My dads old house was bombed in the second world war. He remembered waking up and seeing the stars through the hole in the roof! Luckily no-one was hurt and the house wasn't too badly damaged.

The house I lived in as a child was a listed building in Kent, it had a priest's hole and secret passage
it was built between 1550 and 1600. because of its appearance the local children named it the "Gingerbread House".
It was called Watersland, named after a family that owned it at one time. My maternal great uncle had purchased it for 650 pounds on his retirement from the Kent police force,he had a small holding there,
A few years ago it was on the market for two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.
I have very fond memories of my life there with the goats, rabbits and chickens, the later being kept at night in two old railway coaches named after London stations.

Anne

My house is a council build, built in the 1930's. The original tenant came to visit me about 15 years ago!!
the house has little history, but the area does!!
The two-up two down house my mum was brought up in was purchased new and on leasehold (99 years) from the church by my gg grandfather in the 1840's. It remained in the family (two families living there when my mum was small) until 1938 - when it was bombed! Grandad got £6 compensation.
The house was built by John Ransome a bit of an entrepeneur and loud mouthed councillor. The frames for his houses were old bits of boat, and it's amazing the remaining houses have stayed up as long as they have!!

maggie

My house was built in the late 30s. It was terraced housing built for the workers of (i think) Kirkstall forge - although my neighbour who grew up in her house- said her father worked the local quarry. It has a beautiful big church next door but one and used to back onto some beautiful woods..
Unfortunatly the council built an estate infront of it in the 40s and spoilt the location.
I LOVE my house though, people always ask me why i don't move but it's my home - it's got loads of original features (fireplaces etc) and has a MASSIVE garden - something new houses never measure up to!

LOU XXX
Ps. it was lived in by the vicar to the church, then rented to a local family, so i'm the third owner!!!

My house used to be council owned and my grandparents rented it and my mother grew up and got married from it. I moved in with my grandparents when I was 18, sadly my grandfather died a few months after I moved in, my grandmother outlived him by another 10 years which is when I bought it from the council after she died. OH and I now own it completely.

The land used to belong to the manor house and the lord and master sold the land with covenants attached stipulating that only so many houses are to be built per acre, thus my area Sea Mills was known as "The Garden Suburb" The house, semi detached was built around 1930's and has been through WWII. A bomb went off up the road, luckily missing ours (probably intended for Avonmouth docks which is about 5 miles down the road).

It also has very large gardens front back and sides.

There was one previous tenant and old couple previous to that, so really it has been the family home for quite some time.

My next door neighbour has been here most of that time too and knew my mother and was one of the first people outside of the family to hold me when I came home from hospital with my parents 51 years ago!

Ive traced mine and my sisters house back to 1841. Mine was a bakery and nothing much interesting happened but my sisters had a rather large family all squished into a little cottage. By 1871/81 the kids all grown up and left home and the father died around 1891 leaving the mother a widow ...... she was living in a shop doorway which could very easily have been my house!!! :(

Same here,in Kent, with a house with no history we moved here in 1967 and it was a new build. The land it was built on was developed as a new estate from a previous pig farm we were told .
Our family house however in Charlton SE London was a Victorian terraced house on 4 floors& with Attic bedrooms and my Maternal grandparents moved in in 1911rented of course.The family lived there to 1980 when my mum died & then it was handed back to the letting agents.
The garden rooms at the back of the house had a scullery with the bell board on it which had the room descriptions ie drawing room .which would ring if the bell pull was pulled in the appropriate room. apparently they were gentry houses and along the back of the terrace gardens there was a wood yard that had been the stables where the horses were kept.Bliming cold house tho in the winter the attic bedrooms would have crazy pattern ice on the inside of the windows from the breath of the sleeping occupants .was a smashing house though for kids especially at Xmas.
I have looked on the 1901 census and found the people living in it then were German which is a coincidence cos my paternal gran married a German man in 1904 in Woolwich and then ended up living next door at no 13. My dad chatted my mum up over the garden fence in late 1920,s and they married on Christmas day 1929 .

Shirley

Our's isn't that old, 1960s, with no interesting history.

I like old houses too.
When I was a young teenager I loved to stay at my friend's house. It had been an old forge and had a huge inglenook fireplace, ....Lovely.

~~~~~~~~~~~ Waves to Kitty.

Gwyn

I've just been in touch with the man who owns my dads old house. It was apparently built in 1869 and was the game keepers cottage to an old stately home.

I do have the deeds to my house going back to when the land was left to someone in a will. Sadly my house was built in the 1960s!

Sadly not a very interesting one..............we moved here when it was new in the 70's.


I love old houses, they have so much more character than new ones.

.....what do you know about it's history?

Does it have a tale to tell?