No 57: The History of a House

Thursdays at 8pm on Channel Four from 3 July

The series will tell the story of 57 Kingsdown Parade from when it was first built in 1779 right up to the present day. For more than 200 years succeeding generations have used the same rooms, adapting the space for their contemporary needs.
It looks at how the people living in the house and the way the rooms were used and decorated, reflects not just changing fashion and styles, but wider social, political and economic trends.

Each programme will explore a different period of time, between 30 – 50 years in the life of the house. The interior will be decorated and set dressed with furniture, objects and gadgets from that period to give an impression of how the families occupying the house might have lived there.

As well as decorating the rooms with period wallpaper, paint and furniture the series will ask why they had certain things. Why was a carpet fashionable and where did it’s design come from? What fabric was the sofa upholstered in and why? Did they have wallpaper with a particular design because of advances in technology?

A thread running through the whole series will be the evolution of design - how one style of furniture or wall paper evolved from a previous one and how what was fashionable in 1850 might well become fashionable again 50 or 100 years later.

The series will explore the families who lived in the house, what they did for a living, and how they used the house. It will reveal why they had certain things in their house, where they came from and what they tell us about the wider social and historical context.

While the house will be the backbone and heart of the series, the stories will also take the viewer outside to look at how the families and what they had in their home were influenced by contemporary Bristol and the wider world.

PROGRAMME PERIODS

Programme One: 1779 – 1845
This will look at how the house was built as part of a boom in speculative building and the development of new areas of the city and who the early residents were.
Our main characters will be John Britton, a young gentleman and Mrs Hobbs, a widow who lived in the house for thirty years. In style terms the programme will cover late Georgian and Regency trends.

Programme Two: 1849 – 1879
This programme will look at the rise of eclecticism and how developments in engineering, science and manufacturing influenced what was an available for people to have in their homes.
The key families will be the Tratmans who ran a ships' Chandlery in Bristol, the Stansbury’s, - three spinster sisters who’d previously lived in India and the Withers, a watchmaker with his wife and three children.

Programme Three: 1880 – 1905
High Victoriana and the influence of the aesthetic and arts and crafts movement will probably be looked at in this programme.
The house is by now not as it once was and the whole area has come down in the world a little bit. The occupants include the Alder and Arscott families – both fathers were accountants and Mrs Annie Edwards, a music teacher with grown up children and a lodger in the house.

Programme Four: 1902 – 1930
Design themes will probably include art Nouveau and early modernism as well as looking at the increase of domestic technology. It’s also the time when the house would have got the first proper bathroom and an indoor loo.
How would the house have felt during WW1 and what did that mean for the family living there during most of this period? There was husband and wife and their grown up daughter who was a seamstress and probably worked from home.

Programme Five: 1930 – 1965
Modernism and technology and how they impacted on the house, WW2 and the Festival of Britain will come into this programme.
The house is unfashionable as is the Kingsdown area and has just one family living in it for most of this time.

Programme Six: 1969 – Present Day
The house and the Kingsdown area are now up and coming and by the present day it’s once again a fashionable and desirable address. The series will leave the house as a modern home on the market.
Pretty much the same room layout as when it was first built remains - having been continuously used and adapted for more than two hundred years - and now once again ready to welcome a new family.

6 x 60 minute co-production with Two Four Productions for Channel 4.

Executive Producer: David Edgar, Charles Wace & Jill Lourie

Series Producer: Hannah Wyatt