In London’s Spitalfields district, a gas lamp above a black door on Folgate Street beats against the red neon glare of a hotel across the street. This area in the East End has gained traction in recent years as a landing spot for baristas, beards, and boutiques built in shipping containers.
Though the pulse of time moves Spitalfields ever forward, one address, 18 Folgate, plays in the theater of the past. Visitors enter each room, from the basement to the attic, without a guide to interpret the surroundings. A few notes encourage visitors to linger and observe, taking in each carefully selected detail in this home of a prosperous 18th century silk weaver. Except, of course, this is nothing of the sort.
18 Folgate Street isn’t a museum. This house is a fantasy: a bold act of historical reinvention, a challenge to the bleached neatness of formal house tours, and an exercise of imagination for both the creator and the visitor. This is the home of an American, Dennis Severs, a Southern California transplant who arrived in London in the late 1960s but didn’t find what he came here to experience. And so he created it.
The cloth cover over a vest button. The romantic glow of beeswax candles. It was nothing like his high school or the landscape in Escondido, where his parents owned a gas station. Severs graduated high school and moved to London in 1967. But the view he found there wasn’t the one he expected.
From his lurching seat, Severs had a view of mod London: ugly high-rises, polyester office costumes, too-bright lights, and last night’s smudged eyeliner. He didn’t want a bubble of history to carry him into contemporary society; he needed a space where he could block out the present completely. 18 Folgate, the story goes, had been one of the few homes in Spitalfields continuously occupied for 300 years. When Severs bought it, a sick old man lived on the second floor; within weeks of the sale, the old man died, his family collected the body, and Severs moved in. Severs’ vision for his new house wasn’t a traditional renovation project. Rather, he de-renovated it.
He lit the rooms with candles, and when he didn’t have a candle available, he quit the night’s activities and went to bed. And in perhaps his greatest act of invention, he concocted people to live with him: the Jervis family, Huguenot silk-weavers who were typical of the people who lived in Spitalfields in the 18th century. Severs offered tours of the house but grew increasingly frustrated with guests who didn’t take his efforts seriously. He threw out one woman who claimed she was a descendent of the Jervis family. When a professor arrived at the house with a bunch of tittering American students, he threw out the lot of them.
To judge this house against a standard of historical accuracy misses the point. Dennis Severs wasn’t interested in exactly re-creating an 18th-century interior – plenty of museums do that already. He wanted to create a piece of theatre, where visitors engaged their imaginations to fill in the blanks and take the set of characters he had created and make them living, breathing people with eccentricities, desires, dreams, and failings.
The house blocks out the present day nearly completely. Heavy drapes cover the windows, and the only light comes from candles. The quality of light changes from floor to floor as the material changes from luxury beeswax to machine-made candles, and the Jervis family experiences the advance of time and a fall into poverty.