Dennis Severs' House
Dennis Severs' House
1724; 1979-1999, interior, Dennis Severs
18 Folgate Street e1
020 7247 4013; www.dennissevershouse.co.uk
Tours only. Check website for schedule.
Dennis Severs' House is a museum of sorts, but also the very
opposite of a museum. It's a Georgian terraced house tucked in a back street
between Spitalfields Market and the City, restored in the styles of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries by Californian artist Dennis Severs, who died in 1999.
The best time to visit is a dark winter evening (you have to book a slot
beforehand). A man in a black shirt and black trousers will open the door (you
have to knock, there's no bell) and take £12 off you, in return for which you
are allowed to walk around the house for forty-five minutes. The man will tell
you that you have to do this in complete silence. There is no electric light in
Dennis Severs' House, only candles and open fireplaces.
Stumbling from room to room, you
feel not only like you are travelling back in time but like you have walked
straight into a Dickens novel, or the Hogarth painting that hangs in one of the
rooms. There are half-made mince pies on the kitchen table and spilt glasses of
punch in the smoking room, and there's a real canary in the lounge.
Occasionally, you can hear the haunting chime of clocks, the rattle of a
horse-drawn carriage outside, and the creak of footsteps in the room next door;
it's as if the people who used to live here are standing around the corner.
As with any good story, you feel like
you've uncovered a secret by the time you get to the end, the last room in the
house. On the top floor, eighteenth-century opulence gives way to shocking
nineteenth-century poverty. The wallpaper is peeling off the damp walls, the
bed linen is filthy, there's a stench of oysters and vinegar, and it's freezing
cold. It comes as a shock when you realise the banisters have been burned for
firewood: such was the completeness of Severs's operatic vision that he has
planted the seeds of its own destruction inside it. As youn walk into the cold
winter night, you will try to touch the next automobile on the pavement just to
see if it's real.
Philip Oltermann
Philip Oltermann was born in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany. Since 1997 he
has lived in London, where he works as an editor at The Guardian. He is writing
a book on Anglo-German meetings.
