A House Through Time: First Scottish property to feature on TV series is home to famous sculptor
The TV historian also appeared on Celebrity Traitors earlier this year
It is a well-loved TV series which unlocks the history of a single house - from the day it was built to modern times.
Now A House Through Time, hosted by David Olusoga, is to explore the past of a Scottish property for the first time in its sixth series - investigating the history of an 18th century home on Edinburgh’s Calton Hill.
The property, at 20 and 22 Calton Hill, has been home to a variety of owners and tenants over its 300 year history - including as the childhood home of John Steell, the sculptor behind the statue of the Duke of Wellington on Princes Street; a church minister who helped French prisoners escape from Edinburgh Castle in 1799 and a man who helped found the Scottish post office system. It was also the home of a brothel keeper, Katherine Johnson, who appeared regularly in court records for holding a “house of ill repute”.
Olusoga, who appeared on Celebrity Traitors earlier this year - where he reached the final, eventually losing to “traitor” Alan Carr - said he had wanted to bring the series to Scotland for some time. Now in its sixth series, A house Through Time has previously explored homes in Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol and Leeds, as well as London and Berlin.
He said: “This series is the first time we’ve been outside of England in the UK. We did go to Germany before Scotland, so I have been keen for a long time that we came here.”
Olusoga’s ancestors were farm labourers who worked the fields around Haddington and Tranent in East Lothian, although he was brought up in Gateshead, near Newcastle.
“I’m a regular visitor to Edinburgh and every year I visit the farm cottages in which my ancestors lived and the cemetery in which they were buried,” he said.
“No offence to Glasgow, but to me it had to be Edinburgh, the ancient capital. Lots of cities are architecturally beautiful, but Edinburgh is topographically beautiful, it’s up there with Rio and Hong King and Cape Town and Genoa and Naples, in terms of being built in this dramatic place. I didn’t want to do another Georgian house in another English city, I’ve long wanted to bring the series to Scotland.”
Choosing a property takes months before filming begins.
“We talk to local experts and historians and we look at heritage sites,” said Olusoga. “But we also flyer areas that we think are interesting.”
He said his team had created a shortlist of ten properties around the city, from which he selected the Calton Hill home. The property, which is now split into two flats, has been divided in previous incarnations over its history.
The team whittles the shortlist down to three and then have to research the history of each property thoroughly to ensure there is enough information to justify an eight-part series.
Built in the 1720s, the house they eventually chose posed a difficulty for researchers. Census records only go back as far as the 1840s, meaning inhabitants of the home before that date have to be tracked down through sale records and business directories. Olusoga said newspaper records, particularly archive copies of The Scotsman, were heavily used in the research stage, while specialist genealogists with expert knowledge of Scottish records, were hired locally.
Research uncovered the property’s connections to Steell, who lived there as a child, with his parents, including his father, himself a carver and gilder in Edinburgh.
“His imprint is all across the city,” said Olosuga. “Then we have the Reverend William Fitzsimmons. If you’d been in the city in the early 18th century, that was a story everybody knew, that was an infamous story. It was a huge court case in Edinburgh, which rested on one interpretation, whether this was an act of treason, or religious-inspired humanity.”
Francis Ronaldson was also one of the early residents of the house.
Olusoga said: “He was helping establish the Scottish postal service, but he was also a member of the Edinburgh Royal Volunteers, a volunteer regiment committed to defending the status quo, defending the king, defending Parliament and opposing the document of universal suffrage, which we would call having the vote.”
He said when the house was built, it was “clearly” a middle class house. However, the series intentionally selects properties which have “rise and falls in their fortune.”
“For the first generation who live there, we have shopkeepers and Francis Ronaldson, then in the 19th century, a few things change,” he said.
“One is, the New Town becomes the place wealthy people go to, because you have streets and crescents of beautiful Georgian houses and that draws the wealthy. But the other thing is they build the prison. Living beside the city’s jail, such an austere, gothic building, isn’t great for the neighbourhood. The area becomes outclassed by the New Town.”
He added: “I had a very strong view that I didn’t want the property to be in the New Town. The thing I didn’t want to imply by being in the New Town is that Edinburgh is only architecturally interesting when the English came.
“To be in a city that has its own vernacular architecture that’s more similar to Europe, like Prague or Stockholm, felt like a wasted opportunity [to use a Georgian property]. It also felt like it would be disrespectful to Edinburgh because of the history, the castle, the Flodden walls, the forces of history, mainly the English, invading all of the time.”
He describes the research process as finding a “chain from the people who first put their key in the lock to the person who does that today”, adding he found the two current owners of the flats “delightful”.
“They’ve really loved having the history revealed, they’ve been fascinated by what we’ve discovered and they’ve adored seeing images, portraits and photographs of the people who used to live in their homes,” he said.
“In the final scenes of the series, we reveal the people we’ve discovered, so we can say to them, ‘This is the guy who used to sleep in your bedroom, these are the children who used to play on your steps’ - and that’s the magical bit I look forward to, when you introduce 21st century people to 18th and 19th century characters with whom they share the same personal space.”
A House Through Time returns to BBC Two and iPlayer on Thursday, 13 August.
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