Different Realities

Hot. Waiting for the house to open. Click to enlarge.

Sunday afternoon. 30° C . We made our way through the crowds in Spitalfields, a part of the East End which was settled by the Huguenots fleeing religious persecution in France in the 17th century. In recent years it has become deeply trendy, with art galleries, winebars and glass high rise office blocks rubbing shoulders with rows of Georgian houses which are now priced out of reach of most of the original inhabitants. I view the area with some suspicion now because of its yuppification, but there was no denying its sweltering, teeming liveliness.

I was with my sister, the organiser of our outing. She lives outside London but is often more tuned in than I am to happenings in the capital and she had found out about Dennis Severs’ House.

It is difficult to know how to describe it. In the words of the website (which is really worth a look) the house in Folgate Street, built in 1724, is:

… a time capsule .. sometimes opened up. Its creator Dennis Severs, an artist who used his visitor’s imagination as a canvas and who lived in the house in the same way as its original occupants might have done in the early 18th century.

The house is set out as a series of “tableaux vivants” as the home of a family of Huguenot weavers during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, with a soundtrack of sounds of the period such as horses hooves, voices, bells. Smells of cooking wafting through the rooms.

There are no tours as such, the visitor is simply directed to start in the basement and end at the attic. Speech louder than a whisper is forbidden, and visitors are asked to give focus and concentration to the experience.

The house is crammed with period artefacts . There were open fires in several of the rooms, even in Sunday’s heat, but strangely the indoor temperature was not too uncomfortable. Candles supplemented the light coming through the windows. A black cat was ensconced comfortably on a window seat in one of the bedrooms, and looked at us curiously as we approached. In the dining room, a half eaten apple had been left on one of the plates at the table and a man’s wig hung on one of the chairs. Unfinished cups of coffee too. A place frozen in time.

There was just too much to see and hear, too much detail to absorb. Nonetheless the experience was a haunting one.

We re-emerged into the glare of the afternoon sun, back to the world of ipods and wifis. Sitting in the shade outside a coffee shop at the foot of one of the glass towers we talked about the house and then started to catch up with the minutiae of each other's lives – jobs, friends, plans. We get on well, my sister and I, and it was good to see her again.

Later I came across these words on the website.

Take it from Mr. Severs, a bystander, that when you are under the spell of your own time you are as interesting to watch as were those before; it is always the same plot: Soul - Soul. For him it was your humanity in response to the house that adds life to it and makes tending it so worthwhile.

"Under the spell of your own time". My mind has been hovering around that phrase since Sunday evening. I think I know what I understand by it, but that's perhaps for another post.