The hunt for all our yesterdays

The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. Or so LP Hartley told us in the opening sentence of his novel The Go-Between, published in 1953. But we're now keener than mustard to catch hold of all our yesterdays.

Two days ago, the Kewbased Public Record Office was stunned by the overwhelmingly avid response to its decision to put the 1901 census on line (the most recent census released under the 100-year rule that protects individuals' privacy). I'm surprised at its surprise. The Public Record Office should have known that, these days, everyone wants to be a DIY historian.

Television puts its money into costume dramas such as Trollope's The Way We Live Now. Even soaps like Coronation Street and EastEnders are comforting dramas of the past: where else in 21st century England does everything centre on the local pub, which in the real world is a dying institution? Meanwhile, the popular histories pile up in book shops. They're another thread back into the past, which you can hold on to like Theseus finding his way out from the Minotaur's Cretan maze.

But if you clicked on to www.pro.gov.uk/census this week, the odds are that you'd only see - as I did - a message of apology from the Public Record Office and "our partners, QinetiQ". At any given moment, about 1.2 million people were trying to reach the site. The system couldn't cope; it's having to be expanded. I find QinetiQ's unpreparedness especially alarming.

It's the silly new name for the Defence and Evaluation Research Agency, which is now a technology company wholly owned by the Ministry of Defence.

Two things, in particular, bring out our unquenchable thirst for the past - family and home. This should console anyone who fears that both institutions are being flattened out of existence by the impious steamroller of post-modern morals.

Genealogy used only to interest people whose family might feature in the hefty crimson tomes of Burke's Peerage and Baronetage. It was a snobbish, if perhaps harmless, pastime - comparable to a deep interest in heraldry, or to the spy Guy Burgess, when exiled in Moscow, still devotedly buying his shirts, hats and shoes from St James's. But family trees have now become an abiding national passion. Democracy entered the equation. Every family is "old" if you can find out enough about it.

The shabby, cramped Registrar General's office in Aldwych was overwhelmed by the flood of history hobbyists who wanted to ferret through the microfiches of births, deaths and marriages. It shifted into a new family records centre in Islington. The Mormons - a growing sect in Britain - may have begun this particular mad rush back into the past. Any new convert is enjoined to baptise all ancestors retrospectively as Latter-Day Saints. But the British needed little encouragement to wallow in history. Gentrification has converted the passion into a mania. London is becoming a city divided between the professionals and the poor, with few left in between. So the middle classes have expanded their homes into territories that once they wouldn't have sniffed at. That terrace house in Tower Hamlets, that cottage in Kensal Rise, that flat in furthest Acton - it would be so much nicer, wouldn't it, if we could give them an authenticated history?

For the time being, you can't search the 1901 census site by address. This won't happen for another month or so; but the Public Record Office reckons that many of the frustrated web searchers don't yet know this. When the upgrade does happen, inquiries will flood in even faster. Much of the data has long lain unread, of course, in other forms - in the dusty back- numbers of street-by-street directories in innumerable local libraries.

This has none of the instant-knowledge glamour of a web search.

When I first helped to gentrify one north London neighbourhood (or is "colonise" a better word?), I was puzzled by the odd street-name, Patshull Road. Helped by Gillian Bebbington's excellent guide to London streets, I eventually found it was named after a Staffordshire mansion, belonging to the Earls of Dartmouth (which is now a country house hotel).

The street was then, unequivocally, a slum. The house next to ours was divided into 20 rented rooms, which contained everyone from fulltime prostitutes to Nigerian cabinet ministers in exile.

When we moved, some years later, to another street about a mile away, I found that this, also, had belonged to the Dartmouths until they sold it in the 1920s, under pressure from the collapse in farm-land values.

The deeds, I noticed, had been witnessed at Patshull Place, Staffordshire, by the family butler. All this gave me a sense of historical cosiness, like Linus's comfort blanket in the Peanuts strip cartoon. With gentrification comes a need to know - and, if possible, to record.

Away from central London, blue plaques are one giveaway of gentrification. I was delighted, for example, when I found that George Orwell had lived, very briefly, in the next street to ours, when he was writing his early novel, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. I struck fast, and persuaded the GLC to put up a plaque, ahead of other spots that were probably more deserving. When I unveiled it, I felt I was putting the thumbprint of history on a previously unregarded backstreet.