House History 
Services

​There are many official records available that can be used to reconstruct the history of a property. Some of them, like census returns, concentrate on who the people were and rarely identify on their own exactly which property was involved. This means that other records have to be consulted as well and together used to triangulate the property whose name or street number may have changed over the years: I have used title deeds, old manorial records, local libraries and museums, the Royal Commissions for Historic Monuments in England, old maps, probate documents, and even gravestones.

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Using these I can identify who owned or occupied the property at a certain date or over a period of time, find the earliest date the property is mentioned, find other properties the owner also owned, etc. I can investigate the background of certain owners, the local history of the area, or factors that influenced its building style.

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Here are three examples of my House History work:

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Example 1: Shenstone House in Burwell, Cambridgeshire

My client wanted a full history of their family home to give to her husband as a Christmas present. This visibly old house on North Street has existed as a farmhouse since the early 1600s. In that time it has been extended and improved, and much of its original land has been sold either to be built upon or to expand the garden of neighbouring Burwell House. 

Careful detective work using 19th century census results identified who occupied the house after 1841. To find who had owned the house before then took me to the Burwell Tithe Apportionments map and to Court Records of Burwell Ramsey's Manor at The National Archives in Kew which recorded the owners of the property. Abstracts of later property deeds, provided by the client, confirmed these results and brought the history up to the present day.

I then used other local records to build a picture of the families who had lived in the house, like Hannah Shaw who inherited it in 1784 as the sole surviving daughter of her widowed mother, or the wheelwright William Bridgeman who bought the house for £70 in 1828, whose descendants inherited it for two further generations, and who was buried with his wife and daughter in the graveyard of the Baptist Chapel almost next door.

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Example 2: 16, 18, and 20 Conway Street near Fitzroy Square in London

My client had been surprised to learn that his ancestor had owned three large townhouses in Fitzrovia when he died in 1903, which were significantly grander than the house he lived in, and wanted to know when he had acquired them and from whom.

Fortunately in the 18th-20th centuries the County of Middlesex kept detailed records of property transactions, which can be laboriously searched in the Middlesex Deeds Registry at The London Archive. By first locating the deeds for the sale of these in 1903 I was able to identify when they were first registered and by whom. It was then a slow job to search the registers forward from that date to locate when each property changed hands and who the new leaseholder was.

These five storey brick-built townhouses were built in 1828 by William Henry Richardson who was the Sherriff of London in 1829, later knighted. They were built on land owned by a member of the Fitzroy Family: Charles Fitzroy, 3rd Baron Southampton. My client's ancestor had acquired them from his benevolent employer at around the time he retired. 

This also explains why the mews behind these houses is called Richardson's Mews.

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​Example 3:  The Crescent, Norwich

This work was for my own family history. I had read that my ancestor had been involved in the construction of The Crescent, a secluded lane of Georgian houses not far from Norwich City Centre, and wanted to find out more.

By searching Norwich Borough records in the Norfolk Record Office I discovered that a local Norwich charity, the Joanna Scott Charity School, had, in 1821, appointed the client's ancestor, a builder, to build 18 houses on a piece of land owned by the charity in order for annual rents to generate a source of income for the school.

These were to become highly sought after, and are today very desirable houses: one of the first leaseholders had been the Lord Mayor of Norwich. I was able to find the names and rents payable by all the leaseholders up until the early 1900s, enabling me to build a picture of the community of people who lived there. Unfortunately the reality of funding the build of 18 houses eventually caught up with him, with newspapers and court records showing he died a bankrupt owing, among other things, over £1000 to one of the leaseholders.

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Depending on the nature of the work and our agreement this will be delivered in a Springback binder or electronically.