Restoration Stories Patina and Paint in Old London Houses

The soft shine of wooden boards, worn and gappy. The molten luster of mahogany or worn silver; the curiosity of tricorn hat boxes or a fragment of Spitalfields silk; portraits whose owners might once have lived here. Would they have believed that these houses would stand 250 years later? Time has imbued all these things with unforgettable patina—not only in museums, but even more in old Georgian houses still lived in and loved. The majority of these extraordinary dwellings began as ordinary terrace houses, built to a pattern, often in pairs or small groups. Clusters exist in the East End of London: in Spitalfields, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Mile End. They are mostly Grade II-listed, and their owners put up with the bone-curdling cold of winter howling through gaps, with mending and color-matching, patching and piecing. And among them are some unrepentantly furnished with 20th- and 21st-century modern, finding poetic harmony across the centuries.

Philippa Stockley is an award-winning journalist renowned for her writing on London architecture and interiors, and a critically acclaimed novelist. Charlie Hopkinson is an award-winning photographer whose Head Gardeners won the Garden Media Guild’s Inspirational Book of the Year award.

Introduction
The house with grand aspirations - a 1727 house in Spitalfields with an aristocratic past
A conversation piece - a painstaking repair of a 1725 house in Spitalfields
The paint-maker’s house - a historically coloured 1812 regency house in Whitechapel
The modern Jeweller’s house- the 1740 house in Stepney that was almost lost
A different way of living - the 1790 coaching inn in Shadwell
What Lies Beneath - rediscovering a 1726 house in Spitalfields
Fit for a Queen - an important 1726 silk-weaver’s house in Spitalfields
A Dutch still life - a picturesque 1794 house in South London
The glamour of smoke and mirrors - a sculptor’s restoration of two joined 1797 Walworth houses
Saving the unsavable - an award-winning 1810 regency house in Whitechapel
A duty of custodianship - a 1726 Spitalfields grade II* house of distinction
A connection with the past - the 1725 house that began a movement in 1976
The smallest house in the street - one-room-per-floor in a 1727 house in Spitalfields
King Henry VIII slept here - a sixteenth-century gatehouse on the Isle of Sheppey
The carpenter’s son - a lengthy restoration of a 1775 Shadwell house
An artist’s life - getting to grips with an 1812 house in Whitechapel