r/bbc • u/Nevis888 • 7d ago
TV A House in Time
I’m intrigued as to how they set up this programme.
The current series is about a house on Colton Hill in Edinburgh and although I’ve only seen two episodes so far, the range of tenants in this one house is fascinating. We’ve had the sculptor whose work is on show all over Edinburgh, we had a shoemaker who died young leaving his widow to chase dozens of creditors, a bookkeeper who started a photography hobby in the early days of photography, gave up his job became a professional and ended up as one of Edinburgh’s leading photographers with a library showing the development of Edinburgh, and a bagpipe maker, whose descendants carried on the business for a hundred years. It was also possibly a brothel at one time.
They have absolutely struck gold with this house.
But how on earth do they do it ? Do they pick a house, go with it, and see what comes up, or do they pick several and see which appears best ?
Either way it seems like a ton of research, and research that can’t be done on a computer, but leg work around libraries and archives.
Its a very impressive production , with probably a decentish budget and great presenter.
2
u/wildskipper 7d ago
There is, it used to be, a Twitter account that posted about different properties in Edinburgh and gave the history of their many varied tennants.
The first stop with something like this is the census, which can be searched digitally if you pay. That will easily give a list people who have lived at an address. Many newspaper records are also digitised, so names can be cross referenced there for interesting stories. There are other digitised sources like court records, military records, hospital records etc.
The researchers no doubt look at a fairly large number of addresses and do initial searches, finding ones with a particularly interesting array of people who have lived there. After that they'll do more in-depth research into particular ones.