How our streets have gone up in the world since 1911

As the 1911 census goes on line, our writers trace the story of their homes...

The hordes who lived in my lovely terrace

KIVER ROAD, N7
Charlotte Ross

THIS north London road appealed when I bought our home because it was a row of intact terrace houses. At just two neat storeys of London brick, they were too compact ever to have been broken up for multiple occupancy, or so I reckoned.

But in 1911 — when my great-grandmother was a psychoanalyst and my great-grandfather an owner of a textile company — Kiver Road seems to have been crammed to the rafters with extended families, widows, boarders and young married couples.

My modest three bed house can seem cluttered with only a boyfriend and cat but in 1911, it was a little more crowded. Head of the household was Oscar Banks, 66, a smith originally from Paddington, living happily with his Lincolnshire-born wife, Sarah Ann. She bore him no children, but they had a boarder, Paul Franke, 33, a German hairdresser.

I imagined them bumping along slightly awkwardly between the two upstairs bedrooms (now there are three). Then, as I scrolled down the list, I noticed a second entry: Emily Alice Mann, 40, who also describes herself as head of household.

I checked the neighbouring houses. Almost every one had two or even three census entries, each with separate named "heads". My own home, with four occupants and two heads, would have been luxuriously spacious by comparison.

Could this be why Emily, a "teacher of the pianoforte", chose to live here? There may even have been space downstairs, then two rooms separated by wooden double doors, for her piano.

It's an intriguing menage. Did Paul cut Emily's hair? Did she play for the Bankses on a Sunday afternoon? Did the Bankses find it comforting to share a home with adults of an age to be the children they never had?

Life behind my door would surely have been quieter than across the fence. The next-door occupants are listed as postman John Honeybun, 41, his wife Annie, 40, and their children William, Leslie, and little Gladys Honeybun, aged 11, eight and four respectively. They shared their home and garden with Robert and Agnes Manser and their toddler Agnes and baby Elsie. On sunny days the garden must have been a riot.
On the other side, a triple-headed home inhabited by widows Mary Ann Hill, 63, a sick nurse, Susannah Blakey, 60, of private means and Mary Eliza Tucker and her niece Florence Weatherall, 33.

Elsewhere on my street lived organ builders, cigarette makers, cellarmen and shop assistants, omnibus drivers and tram conductors and needlewomen, a butcher, a dairy farmer and a smattering of clerks.

It's a far cry from the Kiver Road of today, populated almost uniformly with professional couples and their young children in £500,000 homes.

From 'clay lands' to bourgeois respectability

CLAYLANDS ROAD, SW8
Nick Curtis

My house in Claylands Road, ­Kennington, is the first of five in a ­terrace probably built around 1895 by the Fentiman family.

John Fentiman, paterfamilias of this dynasty of Camberwell brick merchants, bought a large parcel of land from the Manor of Vauxhall, drained the marshy "clay lands" south of the Oval cricket ground (formerly a bowling green) "at his own expense", and gave his name to the parallel but grander Fentiman Road, laid out in 1806. The manor that he built nearby is long gone but the Congregational Chapel erected by his son John the younger in 1836 still stands opposite my house, and is now home to an architectural practice.

Today, our terrace is a study in bourgeois respectability, having been variously home to journalists, lawyers, charity administrators and officials from the Foreign Office. In my house it's just me and my wife, while my neighbour shares with his partner and baby son, and a gay couple lives two doors down: estate agents claim the houses are too small for nuclear families. This was clearly not a problem back in 1911, when the street also had an earthier character and when my own great-grandfather was a cabinet-maker who was later lost at sea.

My house, valued at £575,000 today, was home to John Spence, 52, a traveller in "druggist sundries", his wife Emma and 20-year-old son Shuld (a family name, presumably) who followed his dad into the family business. Travelling salesmen, then.

Still, the Spences must have felt positively lordly, with six rooms for the three of them, compared with the folk at the identically-sized number nine.

There, 74-year-old James Matheson from Rosshire lived with his Irish wife, 20-year-old daughter, and three visitors: married 22-year-old Blanche Duval, travelling without her husband but with her month-old son Edward, and a three-year-old girl called Gwendolen Green. What's the story behind those evocative names and this unconventional set-up, I wonder?

Over the road at number four, a smaller building than ours which is now a kitchen design showroom, "working watchmaker and jeweller" Harry Eveleigh and his wife Emma lived with their five children aged between 11 and 25 (the elder two, Harry Jr and Mabel, list their occupations as "clock repairer" and "cartirer" — whatever that is).

And down the road at number 15, compositor Harry Bland, 59, lived with his wife and two children, a "nurse domestic" and a chauffeur, plus two boarding tenants, widowed acrobat Harry McCarthy, 60, and storekeeper, Edward Norfolk, 21.

This glimpse into the past lives in my road makes me eager to know more. And if anyone can enlighten me, I'd love to know what a "cartirer" is.

The silver polisher who lived in my house

MOORE PARK ROAD, SW6
Ray Connolly

If you consider a writer, a barrister, a lawyer, someone who works at Lloyds of London and a banker as reliable barometers of social status, I suppose you could say that my Fulham road has gone up in the world in the past 98 years.

Back in 1911 a silver polisher called Charles Arden and his wife and three daughters were living in our house. Next door was a picture framer with his family, and on the other side a carpenter, his wife and 27-year-old spinster daughter.

These were family houses then and still are, the difference being that in 1911 the residents were men with trades rather than professions. It would be their grandchildren and great grandchildren, who reaped the benefits of further education, who then bought what would have been sturdy Victorian houses and made them fashionable.

Wedged between the end of the Kings Road and the Fulham Road, all the houses in our bit of this wide pretty street, with its front and generous back gardens, would have been of three ­storeys, with small back additions for bathrooms. Now they all have four ­storeys, super modern kitchens and sunny roof terraces and are worth more than £1 million.

I'm sure the newsagent's shop was there in 1911 but it would not have been owned by a Liverpool FC supporting, country and western loving Somalian. In fact, every home I looked up was inhabited by people with very English names. But checking up on another London address where the ­Connolly family have lived was rather sad.
When we bought a house in Campden Hill Road, Kensington, in 1969, it had been neglected for decades while being let to students, and it took us 10 years to turn it back into a large, happy house for our young family.

Back in 1911 we see that it was lived in by a 64-year-old widow along with two single servants. There are unhappy stories here of rich widows left alone in big houses and young working-class girls starting their working life in ­service — just like my own grandmother.

An oasis for an artistic floor builder'

KINGSTON HILL, KINGSTON
Chris Blackhurst

TO the right of the fireplace in my living room is a white knob. It's for a bell that long since ceased working, to ring the servant who lived in the room in the roof on the second floor.

I now know, thanks to the 1911 Census, that Alfred Geary and his wife, Fanny, would press it to call Caroline. In 1911, he was 49 and Fanny, 47. They'd been married 25 years. He was a "constructor for artistic floors" and they both came from Manchester.

Note the use of the word "artistic". These weren't any old floors, these were Alf Geary's works of art. They were waited on by Caroline, 21, from Rotherhithe.

Alf's job might explain the parquet floor we uncovered in the front room. It has lines round the edges and must have looked splendid when it was newly-laid and highly-polished.

In 1911, Alf and Fanny had been joined by Harold, 33, a cousin from Nottingham. He was single and "a merchant". Which bedroom was his? The back one, I imagine.

The house is Arts and Craft, a semi, from 1905, on Kingston Hill and now worth £950,000. At that time, my grandfathers were, respectively, a blacksmith and a mill owner. Back in the old days, Kingston Hill was a single track for horses and carts. It's no longer the idyll it appears from faded photographs. But I can now picture Alf and Fanny, all snug and smug, looking over the throng coming and going from Kingston to London.

Across the fence they would have been able to chat with Peter Davey, 53, and his wife, Zinol. Peter was a "national manager". Again the one-upmanship is to the fore — he's a "national" manager, not any old manager. She was 48, born in London. They, too, had a live-in domestic helper, Elisabeth, 28, from Kent.

On the other side, in the six-bedroom detached, Violet Dove, from Norfolk shared the house with her mother, Minnie, 62, a widow, who was born in India, three servants: Daisy, 26, from Windsor; Lizzie, 16, from Bedford, and Annie, 42, a nurse.

Married for less than a year, she had a son, William, aged just one month. Mysteriously, of her husband, there is no mention.

TRACING YOUR HOME'S HISTORY

While the census offers a glimpse into the past of a place, it only gives a snapshot every 10 years.

To find out the whole history of your street or house, street directories are an excellent resource. These resemble a cross between the A-Z and Yellow Pages and were published from mid-Victorian times to cash in on London's vast expansion and provide annual records of residents and their occupations arranged by street order.

Thus Harrods, the Post Office, Watkins' and especially Kelly's Directories give a pretty well continuous picture of the metropolis and its people for just under a century. All the above can be found via the web, though it is much more satisfying to view the originals at somewhere like the Guildhall Library, EC2.

House numbers and street names can change with surprising frequency. Track these through the Map Library at the British Library in Euston Road.

Every local gas or electric company used to publish its own maps in addition to the Ordnance Survey, which means that, particularly for the late 19th century, detailed street maps are available for almost every year. Spot your home and follow the development of the surrounding area.