What was where your house is now?

Judging by the clayey(?) ground............a lake!..........once

 

There used to be a shop called Batchies Shop with a field behind full of horses. they knocket it dow,, cleared the feild & built 5 houses. mines where the shop was.

 

Our house was build on fields about 100 years ago. It was built to house the brewery workers. The family that owned the brewery sold the houses off about 40 years ago. Under the back garden, run 2 of the cellars for the brewery. These were capped in the 60s. 2 years ago, whilst putting up a new fence, we lost a post into one of the cellars.

I want to dig down the side of one and gain access, but the boss says NO

 

As my Victorian house was built over 100 years ago, it would have been farm land before that (according to my Plumstead history book).
Ive rebuilt the inside of my house from below the floorboards, right up to the top of the loft.
Including ripping out & rebuilding all four fireplace harfs & digging out the whole back garden (down about 2 foot).
You know what........ I didnt find one single item from the past.
Not one....... in a house with 100 years of history, gutted !!!

 

Plumstead! I did my final teaching practise at Alexander McLeod, good memories of that school

 

My house is a Victorian terrace and it would have been built on farm land. It was built in 1894 and in the 1910 census it was occupied by 5 people: a man and his wife and two servants. It still has the side entrance for tradesmen to use! Funnily, the man was a manager of a shirt factory from Northern Ireland. My wife's from Belfast and her family has strong links to shirt making.

When I was doing the garden I found loads of roof tiles and bottles, but nothing very interesting. I opened up the boarded up fireplaces and found that they were last used in the late 60s. They didn't bother cleaning them out before they boarded them over!

The area got hit quite a lot in WWII and many of the streets around the house have the odd house from the 50s inserted into a terrace where a bomb destroyed the original house. There was about 80 people killed down the road when a bomb hit a large cafe at lunchtime. My house got damaged by bombs but was repaired. Guess that explains the roof tiles in the garden!

When I cleared and boarded the loft I found an old WWII rucksack up there with a union flag in it from the victory celebrations. It had the guys name on the back too. I've left it up there. Guessing in the 70s or so it was turned into an old peoples home with each room being plumbed in for water etc. Lots of original features were ripped out, but they did leave a couple of decent fireplaces.

It's now a family home again!

Stuart