Prince or pauper

WE thought we had bought an 18th-century house’, says one homeowner of his pretty, Grade II-listed, thatched cottage in countryfied southern England, ‘but were taken aback to find out our garden wall was once the end of a Victorian latrine.’ Recent research on his property, acquired more than 15 years ago, uncovered an unlikely provenance—a compelling snippet of social history, not as a polite Georgian abode, but as one-time Poor Law Union lodgings, home to paupers crammed into a crude, rubble construction and set to work as labourers. The site was almost completely rebuilt