The third series of the award-winning BBC programme A House Through Time aired in 2020 and revealed the history of 10 Guinea Street, Bristol – a three-storey, end-of-terrace Queen Anne-style house built in 1718 by slave trader Edmund Saunders. We showed its fall from housing a single middle-class family with servants into multiple occupation by the 1881 census. My role as the programme’s consultant and on-screen expert is to explore the ways in which the design and material culture of the house changed through time, and how that impacted on the residents. The long-awaited release of the 1921 census of England and Wales in January by Findmypast (findmypast.co.uk) fills the gap between what we discovered about the house from the 1911 census and the 1939 Register.
In 1921 most people in England and Wales lived in a terraced house. The majority rented a house, or rooms, and new property tended to be sold to private landlords. The Lloyd
