1 July 2020

David Olusoga’s BBC show A House Through Time is gripping and hugely informative

First shown in May and early June, it recounts the history of a single house, 10 Guinea Street in Bristol.

BRISTOL, ENGLAND - JUNE 16: A plaque on the Edward Colston statue plinth has been painted to read rejected by the citizens of Bristol on June 16, 2020 in Bristol, England. A statue of slave trader Edward Colston was pulled down and thrown into Bristol Harbour during Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the death of an African American man, George Floyd, while in the custody of Minneapolis police in the United States of America. The Mayor of Bristol has since announced the setting up of a commission of historians and academics to reassess Bristol's landmarks and buildings that feature the name of Colston and others who made fortunes in trades linked to slavery. (Photo by Matthew Horwood/Getty Images)

Bristol’s history, particularly its role in slavery, has been of international interest in recent weeks, after the toppling of its statue of trader Edward Colston by anti-racist protestors on 7 June. It is timely, then, that the third series of historian David Olusoga’s hugely informative BBC show A House Through Time – first shown in May and early June – is set in Bristol, and is currently available to view on iPlayer. It recounts the history of a single house, 10 Guinea Street, from when it was built in 1718 by a Captain Edmund Saunders: one of Bristol’s most prolific slave-traders, he is thought to have trafficked over 12,000 people from Africa to the Americas.

The first episode spans the 18th century, examining everything from wealthy inhabitants like Captain Joseph Holbrook, who kept an enslaved man named Thomas in the house (in 1759, Thomas ran away and, hopefully, escaped), to the Methodist chapel built over the road in 1779, to the abolition of slavery in Britain in 1807.

Later episodes chart the house’s existence through the 19th and 20th centuries, as it transforms from a comfortable family home, to rented accommodation for more than 16 people, a private school, a base for a mail-order abortion and impotence remedies business, and housing for neighbours whose homes were destroyed in the Bristol Blitz. The building’s surprising story enables Olusoga to follow inhabitants from every area of society: servants, an abandoned baby, a gifted teenager sent to a Bristol asylum, the owners of an alcohol-free milk tavern, and an Ethiopian refugee all feature, offering a striking insight into the lives of those usually omitted from history.