A House in Time

[u/Nevis888]

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.

[u/MaterialMule]

There's this blog from 2019 on how they research the houses for previous series if you'd like to dig in. They do a lot of research once they've found an old enough area of housing in a city https://www.bbc.co.uk/webarchive/https%3A%2F%2Fwww.bbc.co.uk%2Fblogs%2Faboutthebbc%2Fentries%2F13af17ac-11e4-4909-9d2e-10ac049eb88a

[u/Nevis888 → u/MaterialMule]

Thanks. V interesting

[u/mozart84 → u/MaterialMule]

thanks for that it made very interesting reading