A House Through Time
Begins Monday 25 March BBC Two
With a few exceptions, the homes we live in are second-hand, places where different people have come and gone over the decades. Once a house has stood for a couple of hundred years or more, there’s every chance that, for want of a better word, the genealogy of the people who have lived in this building might be as convoluted, fascinating and, at times, scandalous as the most colourful family histories.
Certainly, this proved to be the case when A House Through Time, based around a Grade II-listed Georgian townhouse in Liverpool, captured the public imagination early last year, to the extent that local archives reported an increase in footfall in the wake of the series. This success made a second series all but inevitable and now it’s arrived, this time centred on 5 Ravensworth Terrace in Newcastle upon Tyne.
If the location has shifted, much else remains the same. Once again, historian David Olusoga (of Black and British: A Forgotten History and Civilisations) is the series’ presenter. Once again, the home, which has grand fireplaces and generous proportions for a house in the city centre, dates back to the Georgian era, which gives the team two centuries of social history to range across.
As with Who Do You Think You Are?, research is key, with the house’s history traced through deeds and land registry documents, maps, newspaper archives and personal documents specific to those who lived in the house, notably wills. The show also draws on the expertise of academics such as Prof Deborah Sugg Ryan of the University of Portsmouth, who specialises in historical interiors.
But it’s the personal stories that really seize our attention as we meet such figures as a lawyer bent on vengeance, a doctor caught up in a workhouse scandal and a noted marine biologist. Not that all of the inhabitants we meet are so well to do. As with so many inner-city addresses, the desirability of Ravensworth Terrace has changed down the years, and at one time it was a street of lodging houses rather than a place for the professional classes.