A House Through Time

The Second World War puts our residents in danger. Leeds is a shock to a Greek war bride with a tragic past and a return for students who lived here at the Millennium.

Digging into the affairs of the house’s next resident, Benjamin Wild, David discovers a factory owner with a history of questionable business dealings, including an employee mangled to death on the factory floor. But when his business is burned down, allegedly by a disgruntled employee, will Wild’s luck finally run out? David then explores the story of Mary and Andrew Mellish, whose one-year-old child fell victim to one of the Victorian city’s most deadly diseases. Next in our house are William and Mary Lucy Whiting. Committed pacifists, the Whitings take a stand against the Boer War, but with nationalistic fervour running high, their principles come at a cost. Finally, David uncovers the story of Edward Partridge Fearnley. Working on a luxury cruise ship through the 1920s, Edward rubs shoulders with the rich and famous, but his life below decks proves anything but glamorous when there’s an outbreak of TB.

David investigates the house’s history from World War II to the present, discovering tales of mystery and crime, before seeing the house renewed in the 21st century.

David Olusoga traces the house’s fortunes from the late 18th to the mid-19th century, discovering tales of scandal, domestic violence and the asylum.

The final episode of A House Through Time begins in 1946, when John Walter and Florence Smyth lived on Ravensworth Terrace with their daughter, and rented their spare rooms to lodgers. Historian David Olusoga unearths a scandal when he investigates the family’s background.

David Olusoga tracks the lives of the residents of Ravensworth Terrace through the turbulent decades from the 1860s to the 1900s, discovering a family torn apart by catastrophe before the property became a refuge for destitute street girls, and hosted a seance.

In the final episode of the series, historian David Olusoga traces the history of the house in Liverpool from 1945 to the present day. He finds that these are challenging times for the city, when poverty and dereliction are widespread and the neighbourhood struggles with record unemployment. David begins his search at the year 1945, when Liverpool's multicultural community is recovering from the war and housing is in short supply. He meets the son of a young pair of newlyweds called the Quayles, setting up their first home in the attic during the postwar austerity years. David then tracks the rapid decline of the house in the mid-20th century and meets one of a family of seven who lived in two rooms in the house without the most basic facilities. He then sees how the house was abandoned and narrowly escaped the wrecking ball by a strange twist of fate. David then pieces together the evidence to discover what happened to the house during the 1970s, when the house is apparently abandoned, only to be rescued by an enterprising group of local activists and converted into a new home for creative people. These include a successful playwright and a young restaurateur who was part of the Liverpool gay scene at the height of the HIV/AIDS crisis. He then sees how the house, after decades as a boarding house and a shabby set of rooms-for-rent, is restored to its former glory as a single home, and reveals its colourful history to the current owner.

David uncovers the extraordinary stories of a woman widowed in a cholera epidemic who turns the house from a single dwelling into a boarding house. He follows the trail of an ambitious Jewish immigrant from Denmark, struggling to stay afloat in the midst of a global financial crisis, and then sees what happens to a wheeler-dealer whose job is to enable hundreds of people to make new lives in America. David also traces the extraordinary story of the Robinsons - a seemingly successful couple in the watchmaking business. For them, the house is the backdrop to a family drama involving violence, infidelity and a tangle with the divorce courts. The story ends on the banks of the River Mersey, where an unidentified body dragged from the water has surprising connections to the house.