As often happens, it was quite an unexpected trigger that inspired me to start writing about the house. I was listening to a back episode of Start the Week on BBC Radio 4, and one guest was the poet Paul Farley, who has been illuminating the mundane, suburban life of Northern towns. In the programme the discussion touched on one of his poems in which the cellar of a particular house is a living character who listens in, observes and comments on the goings on in the rest of the house.
This idea crystallised for me the reason why "doing up" an old house is such a personal adventure and one that can so easily be messed up. When you first take on an old place, it is a husk of the life that, until moments before you collect the keys, was being lived in it. If, as was the case with our house, the previous occupant had long since lost heart in the place, rarely bothering even to clean it, let alone tend to its underlying needs, you open the door on your first day to a sad, yellowed hangover. And your first instinct is just to rip it all out and start again.
The trouble is, ripping it all out is actually something you have to do quite carefully. It's a bit like using leaches to eat the diseased flesh from wounds, and making sure they don't start on the healthy stuff. An old house has usually been badly abused as well as neglected - previous shoddy workmanship is often more damaging than simple neglect. On top of that, there is now an urgent need to make old buildings like this much more energy efficient. This puts a lot of the architectural charm of sliding sash windows, high ceilings, plaster mouldings and fireplaces under real pressure - often to the extent that you have to destroy or bury those features and then make decisions about whether, and how, to replicate them.
But I think the biggest responsibility is to create a home that is beautiful, relevant and fully-functioning in the modern age, without either clinging nostalgically to everything that charms us about the Victorians, or becoming all "boutique hotel" about the place and having over-priced, overblown and under-usable details straight out of a lifestyle magazine. This is where a bit of time to reflect, and a sense of what Paul Farley was getting at with his cellar imagery, comes in. Because what we really need to do is to listen to the stories our house is telling us, and then to develop the next chapter. We need a way to discern which architectural features are fundamental to the house's character, and which can be altered in a spirit of progress. We need to prove that a house needn't be cold and draughty just because that's how it's always been, but that walls and floors needn't be completely straight and true either. And we need helpers, engineers and tradespeople who are also willing to listen to the house, and treat is part of our family, rather than just taking the "this is how it is done, so this is how we'll do it" school.
People often comment on how new-build houses lack character, compared to old ones. There are some technical reasons for this, to do with street layouts and the regulation, automation and standardisation of constructional details. You could argue that character comes from the element of educated guesswork that went into earlier generations of building. However, in much larger part I'm coming to learn that houses acquire character by telling the story of how they have lived, and of the previous lives that have been lived in them. So it's actually the adaptability of an old house that enables it to acquire character.
The first thing we did when we bought this house was to rip out the worst of the havoc that the previous occupant had left behind. This was not as cathartic as I had hoped. But the second thing we did was to have a drinks party for friends and neighbours; and suddenly we began to sense that this place was going to become home, and that it would be good.
The following day, we started the demolition.....
AW.
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