December 5^th.

Drains inspection people come and fine the manhole is perfectly clear. Their guess is that there was a blockage somewhere in the street below my house and that it cleared overnight. So that’s all right then,

December 6^th

Drains 2. Well, the main drain under the house has been entirely replaced - which took the guys until 8 last night so that I wouldn't have to stay away again. So late! I protested. Let them go home and finish tomorrow, I can stay away another night. No problem, said boss builder, as he is wont to do. Followed by the inevitable, We are Polish. 
Anyway, I have had to be out of the building again today because various connections to the pipes have to be altered so it seemed a good reason to go to the Camden Archives to look up more stuff. It's Wednesday. Turns out they're closed on Wednesdays. Always check! What, always? Yes, always. Ok, then.

7^th December

The drains are in and the concrete round them is going in. On top of that the tons of lumps of clay that were dug out to make way for them, inside and outside the house, are also going back. Bartek is doing this hand by hand, lump by lump treading them down. Outside Sebastian is hammering at something solid – as you might a brick wall you were knocking down, although he isn’t, or so I believe. The concreting outside over the new main pipe has had to stop because of the rain.

Meanwhile the structural engineers (Irish and Italian) have gone head to head with the building control officer (Indian). He had sent them a stiff email complaining, in terminology impossible to understand if you are not in the trade, about the way their instructions were laid out and the dimensions of various steel beams and frames they were proposing. Miffed, stung, livid they zapped back: our proposals were laid out as normal, and impeccably; we have double-checked our dimensions and find them to be correct. It is their professional pride against his clout. Which will prevail? In the meantime, boss builder is fuming. He needs to order the steels and hasn’t been given the go-head.

It would seem diplomatic relations have broken down. I have rung the Italian engineer who says there has been so response to their livid email. He wants to wait for his boss to come in and discuss what to do next. I suggest that maybe boss builder can ring the Building Control Officer, since they ‘get on’. Not yet, he counsels. Let me get back to you.

This is a picture of the drain connection as it now is (and never before was) at the back of the house. It seems to stand high off the ground, which indeed it does but only because the ground was dug down so deep. In time, weather permitting, the ground will rise to meet the pipes. At least something will meet something on this project, even if engineers and control officers aren’t speaking.

December 4^th

Drains 1. The boss builder has decided to lay completely new drains through the house for the reasons I guessed last time. He asked me to vacate the house today so that he can connect various pipes to this new main drain, once it's laid

So off to the British Library to look up those auctioneers who sold off the 300 plus houses for Christ Church College, Oxford in 1955. I had ordered up an entire year's worth of Estates Gazette to look through and establish when exactly Jones, Lang and Wootton and Sons made the great sale. How much did it all fetch?

Scheduled for March 22nd,1955. So I started leafing through for the week after auction day, only to come across the following:

Why? I ask myself. I spent the rest of the day hunting for the auction later in the year but couldn't find it, although even the land registry have told me that my house was bought by the council in 1955.
I have a thought, though. In 1955 a new law came into force that was concerned with what condition properties had to be in to be rented. My guess is that would-be our purchasers of 300 houses were frightened off because all those houses were in a dreadful state. So there was never any auction at all. Only the council was willing to buy, intending to bulldoze the lot. It's just a guess, mind. Local archives tomorrow. 

Back at home in the evening. Bartek and Sebastian are even more unhappy. The main manhole out of the house into the sewer is so blocked that I cannot stay in the upstairs flat anymore. I have left for the night. Let's see what tomorrow brings.

3^rd December

Bartek and Sebastian don’t look happy -  and how could they? They are head to toe in concrete dust and their ears must be ringing, defenders or no. For some reason that I haven’t understood the entire main drain that runs under the house from the back to the front, into the manhole there and then the sewer in the street, is being replaced. This entails digging up a new channel about 30 centimetres wide and I don’t know how deep, parallel with the old one, where sits the huge old terracotta pipe. New lengths of plastic pipe lie waiting outside in the garden and multiple connectors for soil, waste and rain water to go. But why? What has the builder discovered that I didn’t know? How long will this take and how much more will it cost? Bartek says miserably, ‘Do not ask me, please. Ask boss.’ Boss tells me in an email that he will explain on Monday. It was kind of on the cards because the old pipe is, well, old and conceivably it’s no longer possible to get connections that fit its unnecessarily large circumference. Will this be the reason? I will report.

Meanwhile, Ozymandias the loo has been on the move. Perhaps he got tired of the absence of view so low down in the building, because he has upped and decamped to what was once (and ought again to become) a bathroom on the landing. He has been plumbed out (but not in) there so that he can survey the comings and going on the stairs. Little does he know that he will in due course be banished downstairs again. That bathroom until yesterday contained tools, and the plastic-wrapped washing machine, cooker, extractor hood, hob and a basin. These are now all stored in the front entrance hall where the unwary, especially at night, can stumble into them. There is no light in the hallway because it used to run off the power in my flat. But at the moment at night there is no power there. Visitors, be warned.

1^st December

Hm. Yes. Well. The building control officer came today and the upshot is that the builder (Polish) was right all along and the architect (Scottish and a tad eager), Structural Engineer No. 1 (Irish and lovely) and Structural Engineer No 2 (Italian and elegant/charming) were wrong. Not about the little window (we haven't got to that yet) but about the central spine wall that they all thought could remain if it had stood as long as it has. No, insists the building control officer (Indian). You are lucky the house is still standing. The steel frame is necessary but its dimensions should be bigger. Oh, and by the way, the drainage system is entirely illegal. The soil pipes MUST be moved and the internal manhole MUST be moved. And the main drain under the house isn't the best but could conceivably stay though...er...well. And why did the engineer stipulate hardcore when the floor below was hard enough. Too late now though. And so on. So I paid for the services of an architect without which I could not have engaged the services of the structural engineer, for which I paid, whose ideas then went to the building control officer, whom I have to pay. And that's before any building actually gets done. You get the picture?

Meanwhile I may have maligned overseeing architect Philip Hardwick - he of churches and railways and the Euston Station Arch that John Betjeman and others fought so unsuccessfully to preserve. But the 1960s was a decade of knocking everything down, Camden Council being especially zealous with the wrecking ball. My street only just didn't get flattened at the time, though maybe some will now argue it should have been. Anyway. I think Philip Hardwick had no connection (ahem) with the Midland Railway's expansion because he was a station architect, and not involved with where the lines ran. But I am loath to let the story go just yet because it could have been juicy. Let's see what I turn up when I go back to the Camden archives.

November 29

They were drilling through the lower ground floor today to look for the point where the drain runs from back to front, so that they can later plumb in a loo in a relatively close position. All of a sudden I heard an almighty bang and wondered what they'd dropped, and whether they were hurt. Or dead. So I went down to look. The vibrations of the drilling had been so great that the glass in the double glazed door that leads from my study into the garden had shattered. I was intending to replace that door but just today was thinking that maybe I wouldn't do that yet, to save some money. Evidently thinking is a mistake, or at the very least a waste of time.
Meanwhile I have had some interesting bits of information from the Camden Local Archives, to which I must return for another day's research as soon as I can. Here is the interesting sentence: The development of houses on the land (the Christ Church Estate where my street lies) began in the 1850s and the Camden History Society book ‘Streets of Kentish Town’ explains that the design of the houses “was overseen, on behalf of Christ Church, by Philip Hardwick, the church and railway architect”. So I must do some looking up of Philip Hardwick to learn what he considered the word 'overseeing' to mean.

November 30

Slight snag (do I mean that?) The Scottish architect had provided a drawing on the basis of the report prepared by the drainage people according to which the drains run deep enough under the house for the steel frame and its concrete base to sit above without doing any damage. Yesterday’s door-shattering drilling revealed that this is not so. The drain is too near the surface. Back to square 1? The builder has a way round the problem – but mighty costly, I do fear. Or, he says, let’s wait and see what the building controls people say. With luck they will be coming by, some time soon – this week, next week, sometime…