LOCATIONS A House in Spitalfields - A Visit to the Dennis Severs House

Dennis Severs House, London, UK

Image: Pencil drawing by David Gillet

The Dennis Severs House in Spitalfields, London, sits quietly on a side street of similar Georgian terrace houses, in one of the oldest parts of the city. This is Jack the Ripper territory. Gritty and in flux, the neighborhood is in the throes of a gentrification upheaval. A forest of construction cranes, seemingly unaware of the Brexit cloud, looms to the south in the booming financial district. To the east, Brick Lane throbs with a curry-fueled ethnic pulse. There is intricate graffiti in the Wheeler Street underpass, a gateway to the gastro-pubs and noodle bars of hip Shoreditch, just to the north. The revived Victorian Spitalfields Market, only a few years ago on life-support, does a brisk trade selling pork pie hats and craft beer to off-duty brokers, as well as a full range of ethically sourced fresh greens to bearded app developers. Nicholas Hawksmoor’s idiosyncratic Christ Church (c.1715) rises in splendour above a row of suitably retro motorcycles. This is a London precinct on its way up.

But Folgate Street itself, quiet and car-free the night I visited, is lined by aged brick facades that give no secrets away. A small “18” on the glossy black Georgian door was the only indication I’d found the right place. That and a stylish chap with an iPad, standing outside: “Mr. Gillett? Ah, we’ve been expecting you.”

The Grade II listed 18th century house is something quite different from the myriad National Trust houses I’ve visited all over Britain, with their helpful signage, branded merchandise and tea rooms in converted stables. This place is definitely more Peaky Blinders than Downton Abbey.

I’d booked a “Silent Night” visit where speaking is banned and electric light non-existent. It was just me and the experience that Dennis Severs, an American artist, had created after buying the derelict house in 1979. Calling it “a still life drama,” Severs’s goal was to provide visitors with “a chance to be as lost in another time as they are in their own,” experiencing history as a sensual, living thing. “You either see it…or you don’t,” Severs once said. The candle-lit house, spread vertically over four floors, is a quirky Old Master painting and I was invited to walk through the frame and enter.

Privately administered through a trust established after Severs’s death in 1999, the house doesn’t fit into the mold of the typical period restoration. Instead, it dwells aloof in a pool of candlelight, stuffed with period artifacts he’d collected throughout his lifetime, each room painting a picture of a moment in the life of the people he invented to live there, the Jervis family, Huguenot weavers who fled French persecution in 1688 and bought the house in 1724.

Novelist and historian Peter Ackroyd, writing in the introduction to Severs’s book about 18 Folgate Street, says: “The journey through the house becomes a journey through time; with its small rooms and hidden corridors, its whispered asides and sudden revelations, it resembles a pilgrimage through life itself.” And truly, visiting the ten rooms is a revelation, a personal cultural experience that generates superlatives.

Artist David Hockney likened his visit to the experience one would have at a great opera. Make that an opera with no subtitles. Without signage, costumed interpreters or audio-guide headsets, little details take on out-sized significance.

Wet washing hangs from the low ceiling to dry, a dirty chamber pot sits in the corner, a crust of dark bread is torn in two on a pewter plate. If a shivering Bob Cratchit (or the resident trustee) had poked his head through the door, I’d hardly have been surprised.

I left as I’d arrived: in silence and alone, but with a new and distinct sense of un-ease. I had the oddest feeling I’d intruded on someone’s privacy, taken advantage of their hospitality, snooped through their private realm.

I tried to explain this to the stylish chap with the iPad as we left. “Well, you either see it…or you don’t,” he said, then smiling, added: “And I’d say you saw it.”