As the neighbour of Dennis Severs for 20 years, I had the unique experience of the “collection of atmospheres” which he created in his Spitalfields house. We bought our 1724 houses, both derelict, in the same year, yet where the restoration which I attempted took well over a decade, he had his atmospheres up and running for visitors within months.
He could have been an inspired theatre-designer, for improvisation was his watchword. Things were rarely what they seemed: velvet was generally Dralon, not sewn together in swags round the four-poster bed, but stapled, the pillars were taken from nearby fruit-market pallets; the walnuts hung on the chimney-piece were real walnuts, simulating what Grinling Gibbons might have carved. In the candlelight the magical look was what mattered, and his dictatorial commentaries added to the magnetism, even if they encouraged the summary ejection of unsympathetic visitors.
With each room devoted to a different period, while taped sounds of the Jervis family were heard off-stage, he constantly developed his tours for visitors. I would get a ring on my frontdoor-bell, with the frantic message from Dennis over the Entryphone: “Can you put your kitchen light out: it’s the Jack the Ripper episode”.
I never did get to go on one of his tours, though I went round the house on many occasions, and I regularly heard through the wall the sound of the Boer war train leaving Waterloo.
I was glad that he quickly gave up his names for the rooms on the top floor – Scrooge’s room with a high clerk’s desk, and Little Nell’s room with its truckle bed. Much happier was his re-creation of an illustration from Beatrix Potter in his cellar-kitchen.
The Jervis family of Huguenot immigrants, his own invention, were what mattered, and knowing that my house had once been inhabited by James Stilwell, (master silk-weaver reputed to have woven the cloth of gold for Queen Victoria’s coronation gown), Dennis invented a half-true character in Blanche Stilwell, sworn enemy of Mrs Jervis. I marvelled at the ingenuity with which he simulated carriages and carts clip-clopping up and down Folgate Street outside.
He was a great neighbour, and I am glad that the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust plans to continue his work, with the tapes of Dennis a ghostly presence alongside the Jervises.
