My Cultural Life - London

My introduction to 18 Folgate Street was mysterious. The house administrator, Mick Pedroli, was waiting outside the front door with a candle burning behind him. He ticked my name off on his list and said, “you either see it or you don’t”. Then he opened the door.   

Inside live an illusionary family called Jervis. They are Huegenot silk-weavers and the artist Dennis Severs brought them here to dwell between 1724 and 1914 as a living artwork. 

Severs himself moved into the Spitalfields house in the 1970s and spent the next twenty years or so sharing it with the Jervises. In restoring the ten-room house to the 18/19th Century, he didn’t mean to anticipate the trend for ‘living history’ projects, as biographer Jeanette Winterson explained:
 
“As a younger man he had driven a horse and carriage round Mayfair, re-creating the past for his own pleasure, and that of the visitors who queued to time-travel with him. He was a fantasist and a dreamer, slotting history inside imagination, understanding that the only way to know anything, is to experience it for yourself. This was not tour-guide London, this was invented London, where experience was whatever you could be persuaded to believe”.

His house at Folgate Street is as much about experiencing the ‘now’ as it is about stepping into someone else’s past life. The Canadian born artist intended it to be a way of exploring the ‘space in between’ things. 

In terms of a painting, that space is between the inside and outside of the frame.  Have you ever stood in front of a painting and wondered what the people within are talking about?  What they smell like? What they had for dinner yesterday?  Folgate Street gives a very special opportunity to step inside the scene and walk around their lives.  But it won’t happen instantly. 

In the first room I went to, I was tempted to touch things. I wondered if the flowers were real, or if I ought to know who painted the portrait on the wall. Instinctively, I searched for explanations. This is a recreation of an 18/19th century house. Surely there must be information?

“What! You’re still looking?”

Sorry, not you, me. I was still looking and the only sign I found had sussed me out: I wasn’t using my imagination. I could still hear the traffic outside merging with the noise of a horse and cart that sounded from the house’s time.  It was like being held for a moment in the space between two worlds. As I went downstairs to the parlour, I started to feel dizzy.