Unique And Curious: A Visit To Dennis Severs’ House

Walk along Norton Folgate from Liverpool Street Station and you are largely surrounded by modern office blocks, many of which have gone up in just the last couple of years. Turn right however down the cobbled Folgate Street and you immediately feel as if the clock is winding back.

One building, number 18, particularly stands out from its neighbours. A gas lamp outside the front door is usually flickering away, it has red shutters and the silhouettes of figures in the first floor windows.

This is Dennis Severs’ House, a building that is somewhere between a house museum and an immersive experience. I think it is one of the most unusual, eccentric, but brilliant historic places in London. Dennis Severs’ House is a paradox really: it is historical, but also the projection of one man’s imagination. It is very real, but also almost entirely theatre. The building feels alive, but also is frozen in time. A visit here is, though, a unique way to engage with the past. 

It is somewhere that, ordinarily, when you visit, you are not allowed to take photographs, but I was very kindly given special permission and was lucky enough to visit out-of-hours. 

A history In Flux

Spitalfields has a history of change and flux. It went from a Roman and Saxon burial ground, to a medieval monastic enclave to a bustling merchant’s quarter. It fell into destitution in the Victorian period and has a 20th century story of dereliction and abandonment to some degree, but also reinvention and revival. Over the centuries it has been a place of liberty and refuge, particularly for people, often refugees, arriving from around the world: the Protestant Huguenots from the 16th and 17th centuries, the Irish, the Eastern European Jewish population from the late 19th century and the Bengalis from the 1960s and 70s.

18 Folgate Street itself dates back to 1724, a time when many Protestant Huguenot refugees, largely from France, where they were being persecuted for their faith, were settling. They brought unique skills with them such as clock-making, silversmithing but, most notably, silk-weaving and were able to set up successful lives and thriving communities, particularly in Spitalfields. They built many of the beautiful Georgian townhouses that still survive today in the area. 

As the population of the East End swelled in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, most of Spitalfields became a densely packed slum. In the post-war period, lots of the area lay abandoned, with just the fruit and vegetable market, at its heart, still whirring away. Many of the 18th century architecture was left to crumble. 

The Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust

The Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust was established in 1977. Founded by a group of historians, architects and others, they sought to fight for the preservation of the heritage of Spitalfields. Through various methods including campaigning, squatting and acquisition they went on to save whole swathes from the bulldozers. Dan Cruikshank, author and TV presenter, is perhaps the best known name. He has, by the way, written a great (and weighty) history of Spitalfields, you can find copies at the Brick Lane Bookshop here. The Trust continues today and Dan Cruikshank is still a trustee and active member. 

One of the buildings they managed to save in the 1970s was 18 Folgate Street. Buildings the Trust acquired they then sold to people who they knew would care and look after them. 18 Folgate Street was sold in 1979 to a man called Dennis Severs. 

One Of A Kind: Dennis Severs

Dennis Severs was born in Southern California in 1948 and moved to London in the 1960s. He had always loved British history and grew up watching films, such as black and white depictions of Charles Dickens novels. Dennis was attracted to the country by what he described as the ‘English light’ and the romantic atmosphere of the past. He lived for a time in West London and started running horse and carriage tours around Kensington in his open landau, dressing up in top hat and tails. 

After he moved into 18 Folgate Street Dennis proceeded to transform it, renovate it and create a building that was part time-capsule and part theatre-set. He said, ‘With a candle, a chamber pot and a bedroll, I began sleeping in each of the house’s 10 rooms so that I might arouse my intuition in the quest for each room’s soul’.

He created a fictional Huguenot silk-weaving family, the Jervis (or ‘Gervais’) family, who lived there with him. Over many years he filled it with Georgian and Victorian artefacts that were carefully chosen and positioned. It was not supposed to be exactly historically accurate necessarily to how people lived, but he more aimed to create an immersive and atmospheric experience, a ‘still-life drama’.

A Story Through Time

Dennis then would take visitors around the house, each room a different chapter in the story of the area and the family. He wanted it to feel as if you were stepping into a painting with the addition of the sights, sounds and smells of the era. It is also supposed to feel as if the Jervis family have just left the room. A half eaten pomegranate, a pair of glasses on an open book and full wine glasses, leave you feeling almost as if you are a ghostly figure from the future visiting moments from the past.

The house tells the story of the fictional family over centuries, but also as a way of telling the story of Spitalfields more generally. The abundance and decadence of the family rooms on the ground, first and second floors portray the growing wealth of the silk-weavers.

This changes as you climb up through the house. On the top floor laundry hangs from the ceiling, the materials are thin and grey. You get a sense of faded grandeur in the third floor bedroom, patches of the ceiling are made to seem as if they are caving in. 

The House After Dennis

Dennis sadly died in 1999, aged 51. He and Simon Pettet, who lived with Dennis and helped him design elements of the house, were both diagnosed with HIV in 1984. Simon died tragically in 1993, aged 28. 

Dennis was worried that his house and work would not outlive him. However, before he died, he sold it back to the Spitalfields Trust who still run it to this day. The house remains almost exactly as Dennis Severs left it. 

You can read Dennis’ Guardian obituary here.

Visiting The House Today

Today the house is open for tours. Most do a silent night visit, in which you wind your way up, self-guided, through the creaky candle-lit house from the kitchens on the lower ground floor to the top of the house. You are not allowed to speak or take photographs. You absorb the atmosphere of each room, paying attention to the noises, smells and sights, taking in all the little details. I went on one of these at Christmas a couple of years ago and it has stuck with me every since.

David Hockney described visiting Dennis Severs’ house as one of the ‘world’s greatest operas’. It is a surprisingly emotional experience, particularly, I found, when you make it to the bare rooms at the top of the house, lit by one flickering candle. 

They also now run more relaxed day-time visits and The Gentle Author has reinvented Dennis Severs’ tour, as a play performed by an actor. 

You can find out more about visiting on their website here. 

For more information about Dennis Severs and the house, I would highly recommend the Gentle Author’s brilliant blog Spitalfields Life. For example, here you can read a series of interviews of those who knew Dennis.

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