Sunday house chat
Secrets of old houses
My friend Marloes at
said she’d like to see more about our house here on Substack. Well, I love chatting about the secrets of old houses, so I’ll show you some of ours. Come on in!Don’t worry about taking your shoes off, we don’t mind a bit of sand in the house. Ignore the mess, I’ll just run ahead putting the toilet seats down and kicking the dirty undies under the bed.
We live in an early Victorian, stone built house at the seaside on the border of Scotland and England.
We moved here about eleven years ago, after seventeen years in London. We had outgrown our little flat and couldn’t afford to buy bigger, so we headed to Northumberland where our house actually cost less than our London flat. We wanted a slower pace of life and imagined getting a dog and walking everyday on the huge windswept beaches.
So here we are! House, dog, beaches.
We didn’t know when we bought it, but our house was actually built as flats, each flat consisting of one room with a bed and a range to cook on. Imagine how hard that would have been! I so wish I could go back in time and take a look. Sometimes I sit on my bed and try really hard to travel back in time and take a peek. If only I could catch a glimpse of a ghost, sadly nothing to report yet.
All the occupants shared an outside toilet, which is still in our back yard, it has one of those high water tanks and a chain flush. We use it as a toilet/dumping ground (excuse the pun) /shed. The tenants also shared a little out-house building that might have been a wash-house. We had a roof light put in during lock down and I use that as my studio now (pictured above).
I imagine the people living here worked either in fishing or for the railways but I don’t know. The graveyard at the end of the street is full of fishing people, railway workers (one train driver’s grave reads that he was ‘run down by his own engine’ and that he was ‘obedient to his masters’, what the heck!) brewers and rope makers.
There used to be an outside staircase to the upstairs rooms. If you look at the photos at the top of this post you can see an upstairs window as big as a door, that’s the old entrance for the upstairs flats. There’s a small square cut into one of the window lintels (on the right of the window, second stone up), that’s where the handrail would have been fastened to the house.
In the 1960’s the flats were made into one big house, an extension was built for the kitchen, the stairs were brought inside, and this is where it gets really posh, the house got an INSIDE TOILET.
Since living here, we have been driven half crazy by how narrow the 1960’s kitchen extension is. If we have guests around the table, and we want milk from the fridge at the other end of the room, rather than squeeze past and ask everyone to stand up, it’s easier to leave the room, walk around the whole house, enter the kitchen through the other door and get ya milk then walk back round the house to your tea that’s gone cold by now. Honestly it has been driving us insane!
So we decided it would be better to move the kitchen into one of the rooms in the original house.
But the story of this wonky old house continues…
The room we want to move the kitchen into had a mysterious bulge in the floor. The concrete was put down in the 1940’s and at some point something has happened underneath to ‘pop’ the concrete! If you walk into the room you actually walk up hill, and down the other side.
So we got the builders in to investigate. Our builders, brothers, grew up in the house next door and know all there is to know about the strange anomalies of the houses round here. They told us these streets are built over natural springs and that’s why there were so many breweries here in years gone by, the springs provided the water. So we thought maybe we will find a natural spring…
Old ordnance survey maps of the area show that our house was built over an old saw pit, so maybe we’d find evidence of that?
Or a volcano? Unlikely. Or a dead body? More likely.
Really. Berwick lived through centuries of wars between Scotland and England and at times there were so many casualties that people buried their loved ones in their houses. Our builder had lots of stories of people digging up their floors only to find a couple of ancient bodies.
Thankfully we didn’t have a spring, or an ancient body. Actually, I was a bit disappointed it wasn’t an ancient body.
The builder found a big empty cavern beneath the concrete, he thought there might have been a flood at some point long ago that had burst the concrete, and swept the earth away, but everything was dry so he dug new foundations and made us a new floor with, wait for it, 🌟INSULATION🌟 WOOP! The old floor had no insulation, just a thin layer of concrete on bare earth. No wonder the room was always so cold, it felt like walking into a coffin! So the insulated floor will be amazing, we can already feel the difference in temperature.
Anyway, that’s all for now, I realise I didn’t even show you the rest of the house, tell you about new kitchen plans, or Gerry’s printmaking cabin in the garden, I also forgot to tell you about the elbow bone our builders found in the wall and the Victorian graffiti. More of that next time.
Do you like this sort of stuff? I LOVE writing about it. I was thinking we could have a regular Sunday morning house chat.
I love histories of old houses. Tell me about the strange histories of your house, any hauntings? I soooo wish I could see a ghost. No I don’t.
Love Helen
I found some of the old photos of Berwick and Tweedmouth here.
Am I the only one to read Helen's writings in her tone and accent? :)
That was a pleasant little walk in the past.. and present 🙂
Fascinating Helen! Sorry no buried treasure though. I’ve always thought about previous occupants of houses too, they feel so close. I grew up in an ancient thatched farmhouse with a huge iron hook in the kitchen ceiling for hanging up animal carcasses. The whole place had flagstone floors and in one room there were two worn channels in the stone underneath where we thought the table would have been. My dad worked out that they must have been created by the farmer sliding his hobnail boots along the floor as he stretched out his legs after he’d finished his (meaty) dinner!