If you live in an old house, you are the latest in a long line of people who have made your house their home. Moreover, the building itself may have been their livelihood as a farm, a school, a workshop or a pub. We produce individually researched and written histories of these people and the houses they helped to create.
For most buildings there are archives that can be used to piece together a story. Even the smallest house has been bought, sold, leased and been subject to rates and taxes. Their inhabitants were baptised, married and buried at the local church or chapel. They may have left their wills and letters, diaries and portraits. It is possible that your locality was mapped in the eighteenth century or visited by an amateur photographer during the nineteenth.
Archives such as these can be used to write and illustrate a history of your house. The results of the research are usually presented as a professionally bound, hard-backed book that could be a special present for someone or an aid to selling your property.
Here is an example of one of our house histories, Littleton Farm House (7.4mb) in Littleton, near Guildford in Surrey.
We also undertake shorter, less elaborate, projects on a "research and report" basis. For this kind of commission, prices start from £500.
We visit our clients' houses several times during the course of a project because it is necessary to see the building in its setting, study its structure and gain an understanding of the development of its locality.
It is for these reasons that we specialise in researching the history of houses in areas close to our home in Surrey, Hampshire and West Sussex.