Three Houses, Many Lives

The history of place in the hands of a master in the evocation of time and social change. In Three Houses, Many Lives, the houses -- a Cotswold vicarage, a one-time girls' boarding school in Surrey and a Jacobean house now buried in inner London -- represent the changing face of England during four centuries through the many people who have lived in them. Many lives indeed, from the wealthiest to the poorest. The pages of Gillian Tindall's fascinating new book teem with vivid pen portraits, from Eugenia Stanhope who sold Lord Chesterfield's scandalous Letters to his Son, to the just-literate wife of a parish clerk who wrote riddles in his registers. There is the autocratic vicar who held the same parish from age 28 to 82, and the cow-keeper who farmed 226 acres in Hornsey till he sold them profitably when the railways came through and houses sprung up in their wake. The Cotswold village, famous for its stone-masons, was by-passed by the railway age and remains rural to this day, whereas some Surrey inhabitants were, like the Jane Austen characters they resemble, already commuting to London in coaching days. Each house has gone through a series of physical transformations, most of all the seventeenth century merchant's house which eventually became a Conservative Club and then a drinking club for lorry drivers. It is with the skill of an accomplished researcher and elegant writer that Gillian Tindall paints this panorama, from the enclosures to the Oxford Movement, from poor relief run by church vestries to the age of the blogger.