Taking My Kew

Kew Palace

This weekend, I had the fantastic opportunity to go on a photographic course at Kew Palace, in Richmond. It was run by Historic Royal Palaces and led by photographer Emily Harris. I love taking pictures of architecture, as I hope my Facebook and Flickr pages show, but I was useless at photographing indoors and this course was specifically for learning how to capture historic interiors with a digital SLR camera. We were a select group of 7 and had the small but perfectly formed “Palace” to ourselves as the place is officially closed to the public in the autumn and winter months.

Kew Palace is one of HRP’s more recent restorations. I had the privilege of visiting it half way through the restoration/conservation back in 2006, so it was a pleasure to see the place in a more finished state. Not that it is has been completely returned to resemble a royal residence. While some rooms have been painstakingly decorated and furnished to show how the house may have looked in about 1808, there are whole rooms untouched, with bare floorboards and unfinished walls. These allow you to see how the walls were constructed, layer by layer and give a fleeting look at the earlier, 17^th century fabric of the building behind.

Kew Palace has its origins in the 16^th century, with a Tudor undercroft as testament. It used to be called The Dutch House as it is constructed in the unmistakeable Dutch style and inside is laid out over 3 floors with the undercroft below and servants living quarters in the attic.

The exterior structure we see today was built in the 17^th century, the home of a wealthy merchant and was then converted to be a home for King George III his wife Queen Charlotte and 10 of their 15 children. Spending my day there, I learned that the house was mainly for the children and the Queen. George lived in an extension to the house, long since demolished. This was because George III was the unfortunate monarch who suffered from the disease “Porphyria” which manifested itself mainly in apparent raving madness.

But in his moments of sanity George and his wife were a devoted loving couple, who enjoyed the relative simplicity and small scale living at Kew with their children. Not that it was much fun for 3 of their daughters who lived there; liking its remoteness and their lack of a social life to being in a nunnery!

When one’s abiding passions are historic buildings and photography there isn’t much about an historic interiors photography day at Kew that I could fault. In fact there wasn’t. As a result, I like to think I can now take a mean interior shot and that this’ll translate in the research I prepare for my clients. But above all, my abiding memory will be having such privileged access for a whole day in one of Historic Royal Palace’s most beautiful and remarkable buildings.

Some of the photographs I took from the day will be posted on the Historic Buildings Research Facebook page and on my Flickr page too.

Recording the New: The Architectural Photography of Bedford Lemere & Co. 1870-1930

The Victoria & Albert Museum Entrance Under Construction in 1908 (Sir Aston Webb)

Copyright RIBA Library Collection

If you find yourself in London between now and the end of the month I recommend a visit to the Victoria and Albert Museum for the last days of an exhibition co-curated by the Royal Institute of British Architecture (RIBA) and English Heritage, showing the work of the architectural photography firm Bedford Lemere & Co.

In my work I am always pleased if the photographs of Bedford Lemere come up on my search radar. The amount of information I can extract from one image is invaluable, whether it’s comparing changes in the external appearance of the building with the structure today or seeing how the house was decorated or furnished over 100 years ago.

43 Harrington Gardens circa 1897

Copyright NMR English Heritage

At the company’s height it only employed a maximum of four photographers but photographed the work of many leading architects of the Victorian and Edwardian period. Bedford Lemere‘s sharp definition greatly appealed to their clients – architects, contractors and building owners – who above all wished to obtain an almost documentary record of the work they had carried out or commissioned.

Photographer, Bedford Lemere established his commercial photography business in the 1860s and he, his son Harry and the company became famous for their architectural images. The firm continued into the 1940s and English Heritage and the RIBA now own a huge collection of their work numbering over 8,000 images originally photographed on 12” x 10” plates.

The external images stand out from contemporaries because apparently Bedford Lemere worked to a set formula that involved photographing buildings first thing in the morning with the crisp early light and with very few people around. The clarity and detail achieved was remarkable and sometimes it is possible to think that it was taken only yesterday. It is only the lack of cars or satellite dishes or the absence of modern furnishing that tells you otherwise.

Midland Grand Hotel 1890s

Copyright NMR English Heritage

How Old Is My House?

When people want to find out the history of their house the two most popular lines of enquiry are; who lived there and how old is it? But before you can start to discover the occupants of a house, the date of construction is fundamental to understanding its past.

opyright Ellen Leslie

Finding out the age of a building can take you down many paths. The most obvious clue is if there is a date on the building. But don’t let that fool you. Last year I researched a house with 1566 displayed prominently above the front door. But in fact, that date marked the year the house had been extended. The building’s origins went back to 1450.

When working out the date of construction, start by looking at the building itself. What is the style? Does it ooze Victorian Gothic or display Georgian symmetrical restraint? How big are the windows? The smaller the panes of glass the chances are the building is earlier rather than later. I also strongly recommend the book “Period House Fixtures & Fittings 1300-1900” by Linda Hall (published by Countryside Books). It is a fantastic reference source for dating architectural features inside and out!  But the features themselves don’t tell the whole story. A building can be altered adapted many times over the centuries.

So to continue your search, you should also speak to the local history society who would know more than anyone in the area how long the building has been standing. A local historian may have also written about the street or area in which you live.

When I am researching buildings I always combine a site inspection with documentary evidence to support what I have seen. If you have a hunch that your building is late 19th  or early 20th century, go and have a look at the census returns that are available through your local archive. These could tell you not only if the building existed at all at the ten year intervals between 1841 and 1911 but also if it was occupied or even under construction. Local archives also hold collections of photographs that may include your house, narrowing down the possible date even more.

You can check other general records like poor rate books or parish records for reference to your house or street. However, one of the most useful tools for determining the age of your house has to be maps. Maps prior to 1800 can involve a little artistic licence, but they are good indicators and certainly from the beginning of the 19^th century with the influence of the Ordnance Survey, maps of many styles and types can work as a guide to locating and confirming, if not the year, a narrower time frame in which your house was built.

Of course, if your house is obviously older than 1800; if the timber frame and king post in the roof suggests 16^th or even 15^th century then it is possible that manorial records can shed some light on its origins. 

The older your house the more alterations and additions it would have undergone. I recently researched a building with structural elements surviving from the 15^th century, but with extensions and alterations in every century, right up to the 21^st. It can be a complicated process but documentary evidence can shed light on these changes.

If your house is listed, check the date in the listing description. A word of warning though; these descriptions are merely a guide and cannot be seen as 100 per cent reliable. Two listed buildings I recently researched were woefully wrong. In one case it was wrong by nearly 200 years! You could also check the title deeds of your house. However, unless you manage to locate the early version, modern day Land Registry records rarely go back further than 50 years.

The method of dating, like all other research into the history of a building, always requires a mixture of examining the bricks and mortar (or wattle and daub) and documentary evidence. One supports the other; and if you combine all these methods and sources, you should be successful in finding out how old your house is.

This article by Ellen Leslie first appeared on www.countrylife.co.uk 19 Aug 2011 as part of the Projectbook Blog Series.