Somewhere between a museum and a work of art, Dennis Severs House is a portal through which visitors can experience 200 years of London history. Georgina Williams was one of them

Leaving Liverpool Street Station and heading east on Bishopsgate, you find yourself almost immediately in Spitalfields. Historically an outpost to the City of London, Spitalfields was once a place of agriculture, benevolence and burial, taking its name from the medieval hospital and priory of St Mary Spital, founded in 1197.

Located beyond the city gates, the area attracted merchants who were unable to join the city’s guilds and in the 13th century a market was established in a field next to the priory. Over the years the market flourished, encouraging people to settle nearby and the area became a magnet for those seeking sanctuary and new beginnings. In the late 17th century a defining transformation came when thousands of Protestant Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France settled in the area.

The Huguenots were skilled silk weavers and they brought with them trade and considerable prosperity, sparking a wave of significant building around the market.Today the area is utterly transformed – the capitalist swagger of the city with its sterile glass office blocks is encroaching and the market has been redeveloped. However, thanks to the Spitalfields Trust many of the early Georgian buildings survive. The Trust was established in 1977 as a charity to save these historic buildings from demolition and it continues to fight for the preservation of this singular East London parish. Its work is evident as soon as you leave the cut and thrust of the main road; cobbled streets, alleyways and handsome Georgian townhouses all add a distinctive, and now much valued, character to this vibrant area.

In 1979, the Trust sold 18 Folgate Street, a derelict house they had saved, to Dennis Severs. Dennis was born in California and grew up loving historical dramas. In 18 Folgate Street, built in 1724 by Huguenot settlers, he could live out his fantasies – he moved in, taking a candle, chamber pot and bedroll with him and let his imagination fly. He was completely committed to the house, to the layers of life he found there and to the surrounding area. In reimagining the interiors, he conjured up a Huguenot family, “the Jervises” to “live” alongside him and he vividly depicted their lives and fortunes in each room spanning the centuries from 1724 to 1916.

He carried out a gentle yet theatrical restoration, letting his creativity and wit run riot, while respecting the original fabric of the building. For Dennis, atmosphere was more important than historical accuracy and he mixed authentic Georgian and Victorian pieces, with others crafted from found materials, such as the four-poster bed in the master bedroom, which he constructed from wooden pallets.

From the beginning, Dennis conducted tours of his immersive world. He created a multi-sensory experience where paying guests would walk around the candle-lit house. They listened to tape recordings he had made to replicate the sounds of 18th century London, inhaled scents of the era and, on spying a recently discarded tea-cup or half-filled pipe, perhaps experienced a slightly disorienting sensation of travelling through time.

For much of the time, Dennis shared the house and his vision with ceramist Simon Pettet, who moved into 18 Folgate Street in 1983. Together, inspired by 18th-century blue and white tin-glaze pottery, they conceived many of the ceramics that might have been used by the original occupants of the house. Simon inscribed some of the pieces with the name Jervis to add realism to Dennis’s fictional family.

Sadly, Dennis and Simon were two of the first cases of HIV diagnosed in this country. Simon died in 1993 and Dennis in 1999, however before his death he sold the house and all of its contents back to the Spitalfields Trust, which cares for it today.

The house and its exceptional interiors are almost exactly as Dennis left them, with each of the rooms a carefully crafted tableaux revealing elements of the Jervises’ “life” through the years. From the opulent rooms on first and second floors, portraying the wealth of the silk-weavers with sumptuous textiles, grand furniture and tiers of candied fruits, to the top floor where the crumbling plaster, a shared bed and vegetable scraps reveal grinding poverty and hard times. The trajectory of the Jervises’ fictional lives followed not only the rise and fall of their fortunes over 250 years but also those of the surrounding area.

The cyclical fortunes of Spitalfields are buoyant once again, and with them those of 18 Folgate Street. The house is richer beyond measure for its years with Dennis Severs. His remarkable depiction of past lives, and his empathy for objects and places were “aimed at those who want to make sense of the whole picture of being alive”.

A quest that is realised in this unique time-capsule where, particularly in the present day, the “collection of atmospheres” is uncommonly soothing.

This article is from Idler #106.

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