Denis Severs’ House
Born in sun-washed California in 1948, Dennis Severs’ childhood imagination was fed by black-and-white movies of a much grittier time. The films of David Lean were evoking a Dickensian London of shadows and gloom, of decaying buildings and cobbled streets. Visiting the city for the first time in 1965, Severs determined to return, and after his high school graduation returned for good in 1967.
His first reimagining of London past came with horse-drawn open carriage tours around Hyde Park, but this career was curtailed when a developer demolished his stables near Gloucester Road. A decade later he was to sieze the opportunity to do his own bit to hold back the developers. In 1979 he found 18 Folgate Street in Spitalfields - an original Huguenot weavers’ family house from the early 18th century, it created a perfect opportunity to ‘live’ the London of the past. Today, the living museum of Dennis Severs House seems a brilliant idea, if an eccentric one - so it is hard to imagine just how out of step the idea was at the time. Compare the impossibly trendy Spitalfields terraces of today with the tumbledown state of the late seventies.
The previous years had seen huge redevelopment of London. World War 2 bomb sites were still to be seen, and many good buildings had been swept away in the enthusiasm for the new. The restoration movement was yet to gather pace The area was due for demolition, the fight to save Hawksmoor’s Christ Church had been joined, but was 25 years from being won, and nobody in their right mind wanted to live in an 18th century weavers’ house.
Dennis alighted upon Folgate Street just as the enthusiasm (and cash) for large scale development of the borough was losing momentum (think of other projects that didn’t quite happen, such as the demolition of Tredegar Square and the enlargement of the A11 into Victoria Park and breathe a sigh of relief). The tide was slowly turning in Spitalfields. The Friends of Christ Church had been formed in 1976 and artists (such as Gilbert and George in Fournier Street) had begun moving into the area, lured by cheap housing. The Spitalfields Society was visualising a new sense of community in the area, while the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust had determined to preserve this irreplaceable slice of Huguenot London. And of course the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings (SPAB), in Spital Square, was fighting to save the best of the old.
Severs wasn’t to gentrify 18 Folgate Street though. Behind the 18th century exterior lurked an 18th century interior. He moved from room to room of the derelict house (ten rooms) sleeping in each in turn, absorbing the atmosphere of 1720s Huguenot London. Roughing it, his nights were lit by candle - no electricity.
He gradually recreated the house as it might have been lived in by an imagined Huguenot silk-weaving family, the Jervises, (anglicised from Gervais). The fires are lit, candles burning, hats casually tossed on a table, but it seems the family has always just left the room. There are half-finished goblets of wine, and the sounds and smells of the family home, right down to full chamber pots. The tour is conducted in silence, and gradually the visitor loses themself in the atmosphere of the time … and begins to understand. This is ‘a time capsule that sometimes opens up’.
Severs saw himself not as a museum curator but ‘an artist who used his visitor’s imagination as his canvas … for the harvest of an atmosphere which he then employed to provide the visitor with an extraordinary experience. To enter its door is to pass through a frame into a painting: one with a time and a life of its own’. The metaphor varies of course. One man who does know a great deal about the effectiveness of good painting, David Hockney, compared being in the house as akin to experiencing ‘one of the five great operas’ of the canon. Gavin Stamp, in his Guardian obituary of Severs, described the house as ‘a three-dimensional historical novel’ The social historian Raphael Samuel (another Spitalfields resident) meanwhile considered it ‘a magical mystery tour’.
The inability to pin down the house must have delighted Severs, a fierce critic of
‘pigeonholed intelligence’. Critics knocked Folgate Street for its lack of historical precision (and a house that has a PA system piping soundtrack noise from the ’street’ is obviously as much theatre as museum), but that was the point, and the point that they missed. He would rail against visitors who asked questions, even leaving notelets around the house advising them not to look to hard. ‘You either see it or you don’t’ was one of his observations.
The house isn’t open all the time of course - after all visitors are merely slipping into the spaces recently vacated by the Jervis clan. But find the time to experience a ‘museum’ unlike any other. And remember: avoid the temptation to talk, crush down your natural urge to ask questions and pin things down, and simply ‘feel’ the place. To avoid disappointment read the opening times carefully. More information is available at the website, details below.
Opening Times
Every Monday evening (except bank holidays), by candlelight: “Silent Night”. Times vary with the light of seasons and booking is necessary. The price is £12. Then on the first AND third Sunday of each month between 2 and 5pm. The price is £8 per person. No booking required. And at lunch time between 12 and 2pm on the Monday following the first AND third Sunday, price £5. No booking required.
Dennis Severs’ House
18 Folgate Street
Spitalfields
London E1 6BX
Tel: 020-7247 4013
Fax: 020-7377 5548
Email: info@DennisSeversHouse.co.uk