The story of one house in Lausanne Road ............... number 2 a coal hole, a big garden, and that shed

The continuing story of one house in Lausanne Road over a century and a half, of one family who lived there in the 1950s.*

Mine was one of those idyllic 1950s childhoods.

We were free to roam where we wanted, benefited from the growing prosperity all around us and were pretty much left to grow up slowly and naturally.

But looking back I never took to our house.

Not that the house over troubled me at the time.

It was built sometime after 1874, and was one of those tall Victorian terrace houses which this part of south east London did.**

It had eight rooms along with a  bathroom and a small kitchen spread out over three floors with extensive cellars and a long garden which must have once been part of an orchard because we had inherited six pear trees a very tired apple tree and equally unfruitful vine.  But the pear trees produced abundantly and it was not unknown for a branch to snap off with the weight of the pears.

Perhaps it was the fact that the place was so full of rooms and that they were stacked on three storeys up which was unnerving.  After all when you are nine and your bedroom is at the top of the house it can seem along way down to the comfort of mum and dad on the ground floor.

We went back to the house recently.  It was 56 years since I had last stood outside and in one of those wonderful acts of generosity the present owners invited us in.

Nothing quite prepared me for the way the memories came flooding back mixed with the observations on how the place had changed.  But that is for another time.

As a historian what fascinates me more about the place is the description of what it was like in 1951.
My father was a practical man and before buying Lausanne Road he had commissioned a surveyors report.  It is a document that we still have.  Now I grant you it is not the Doomsday Book or an intimate set of letters from one family member to another but in its way it is a priceless piece of history.

Here laid out in the dry language of property is a picture of a house some eighty years after it had been built.

It had, in the language favoured by estate agents many period features, including original plaster decorations on the ceilings, marble fireplaces, sash windows and the old wooden shutters at ground level which could be pulled up from the cellar, along with the wooden venetian blinds and the coal hole which we continued to use until we left.

And here too tucked away is a little of the history of which our house was part of.  According to the report

“The main roof is covered with concrete plain tiles (presumably done in recent years under war damage repairs) and appears to be in very good condition.”

Which I guess is the closest I will get to track the bomb damage on Lausanne Road which had taken out a row of houses directly opposite.  I always took for granted that the high walls surrounding the brick lined water pit had always been there but it was one of a number of tanks for emergency water supplies which had been made by clearing out the debris from the cellars of the bombed out houses and filling the space with water so if the water mains were cut during a raid there would be supplies to fight any fires.

And digging through the same old family documents I came across the selling price of Lausanne Road in 1964 which was £4,500.  A price which might well seem a snip when four doors down an adjoining property went for a shed load of money recently.

But all is relative.  I suspect back in the 1960s that was pretty much what you would have had to pay.

We moved to a smaller property which I have always been more comfortable living in.

And looking through the report on Well Hall Road in Eltham I note that the surveyor pointed out that “We understand that the house is likely to be included in a Smokeless Zone under the Clean Air Act of 1956 and approved appliances must be fitted in the open fireplaces in the lower rooms by October next year.”

This as I pointed out to my sons who looked baffled when they read the report had nothing to do with a drive against cigarettes but was part of that public health move to banish our cities of the smoke from thousands of household chimneys.

Such are the little clues to how we lived revealed in the oddest of ways.***

*The story of one house in Lausanne Road, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/The%20story%20of%20one%20house%20in%20Lausanne%20Road

**Peckham, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/Peckham

*** London, http://chorltonhistory.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/London

Pictures; from the collection of Andrew Simpson