25 November

Bartek and Sabastian are back, uninjured, from last night's apparently very good game. Things are being hammered, or smashed or something downstairs. I will go and look when they've gone home, which - it being Saturday - they soon should. But being Poles, might not.

Meanwhile, as all my books are in store along with everything else, I have been to the local library to borrow a copy of Gillian Tindall's The Fields Beneath, which is a history of Kentish Town. I found one paragraph which didn't surprise me in the least. An anonymous writer to the Gazette (which Gazette?) was remarking on the speculative builders who were throwing up buildings all over the Christ Church Estate in 1859.

He said that a run of houses in Gaisford Street (where my flat is) collapsed before they were up. '...the stacks of chimneys were so far completed as to have the ceremony performed of hoisting the flags, made by workmen's handkerchiefs...so as to entitle the men to the usual regalement of beer on such occasions.' After which the chimneys all fell down, squishing the scaffolding and workmen still on it, sending a large number of them to hospital. No doubt, in those days, they had to pay for the privilege of being treated.

It does make me think that my builder was right when he said that perhaps his English colleagues of 150 odd years ago, who were responsible for the wonky beam that holds up the entrance hall to our building, were drunk when they installed it. Too much celebrating the flag hoisting on a neighbouring roof.

26 November

While I try to find out more about why Christ Church College Oxford sold its estate of houses in 1955 to the local authority, and why the authority bought it all up, and how, it has also occurred to me to ask who built it all. I read today that there was a total of 739 speculative builders in nineteenth century London, of whom 3 employed over 350 people; 9 employed over 200; 57 had around 50 employees and the rest were evidently minnows. Who built my house? I want to find him and shout at his memory, though it's unlikely I'll manage. I have an idea where to start looking but they seem to have kept low profiles. But in the 1889 Christmas issue of the magazine, The Builder, an anonymous one of their number had a Rattner moment. 'I think,' he wrote gleefully, I may venture to style myself one of the wise men who build houses for fools to live in.' Ouch.