27 November

I am sitting in the middle of the building, half way up, reading about Kentish Town. Some things are falling into place (though not yet the name of the speculative individual whose eternal soul I shall send to perdition – once I can be assured of its accuracy).

Down in the garden below Sebastian and Bartek are drilling away at a tough concrete base to create a drain and manhole where none has been. Sebastian is wearing the ear-defenders. Bartek insists he doesn’t need them because he is using a smaller kanga hammer. I don’t quite get the logic of this as he is wielding his hammer right next to Sebastian’s larger one.

Meanwhile, upstairs in the tiny bedroom I am using, which is at the front of the house, the furthest corner away from the noise, lies psychiatric nurse Clare – back on nightshifts. At my suggestion she has given up trying to sleep next to the commotion and arrived on the doorstep looking wan, and clutching her duvet. I hope in a few hours’ time she will tell me she actually slept. Odd how we need our own duvets in moments of stress.

Back to the middle of the house and my reading: In the 19^th century a pattern had developed whereby a landlord who actually owned the ground would lease it for 99 years to whomever – maybe a speculative builder, to do with what he wished. In return the landlord would get a ground rent that would grow annually and at the end of the 99 years whatever had been built on the land would revert to him. From the builder’s point of view, it was meant to be worth it for the rents he had reaped, or the sales he had made to the unwary, who may have supposed that what they had bought was theirs. Leaseholds are still a householder’s anomaly.

The dates would seem to fit. Christ Church College Oxford inherited the land in the 1830s when it was still being farmed. Less than 30 years later it was built over – on a 99-year lease. In 1955 the College sold it because that was when the lease expired and the dilapidated terraces weren’t bringing in the income. Possibly (this bit is my interpretation yet to be firmed up) only the local authority would buy them, and indeed felt bound to, because if they didn’t a large number of families would be made homeless as a result of dreadful living conditions. Would that local authorities still took their responsibilities as seriously. Or perhaps what the council wanted was to knock all the houses down and replace them with something more modern, whether or not their inhabitants wanted that.  In the end, the terraces remained, and I’m glad. But I still want to track down that original jerry builder.