Amanda and Mike’s House
Celebrating the 1935 Silver Jubilee of George V.
Amanda and Mike’s house is the first door on the left.
The conveyance between the third & fourth owners - for a sale of £300
Amanda and Mike have lived in their small terraced home for over forty years. Inevitably, after building their lives there for so long, including bringing up their children and grandchildren, they have become incredibly attached to the house and always wondered who else had lived there before them. Amanda’s job as an archaeologist means she also has an in-built love of history, firing her curiosity further.
The results proved you should never under-estimate the incredible past even the smallest houses might have – size definitely isn't everything. Perhaps the stand out result was the direct link one of the residents had with Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi (read more about this here); but for Amanda the highlight was the fact that a previous occupant had accidentally discovered possibly the most important archaeological artefacts ever found in Canterbury – a set of ornate Roman silver spoons engraved with the earliest known Christian symbols in Britain. Amanda had spent 30 years teaching about the spoons and could barely believe the incredible connection she now discovered she had with them.
Canterbury suffered from two major air raids in World War II - Amanda and Mike already knew their house had been damaged by a bomb that half flattened the next door street in the second raid, but the research also uncovered the tragedy of a former resident, Reginald Cheesman, being the very first victim of the first - one of the infamous Baedeker Raids of April-June 1942.. It is therefore almost certainly the case that their house is the only property in Canterbury to be intimately connected with both raids.
A final highlight was the astonishing story of the first change of owners. The builder and first owner of their home turned out to be one of Canterbury’s leading Victorian businessmen, Henry Bell Wilson, who at his death left an enormous property portfolio. He left his estate to his thirteen children and grandchildren who decided to divide the estate into thirteen lots. Amanda and Mike’s house was in ‘Lot 10’, which turned out to be all the odd numbers of their street – in a solicitor’s office in 1923, Walter Wilson, Henry’s youngest grandchild, literally pulled Amanda and Mike’s house out of a hat.
The commemoration book held in Canterbury Cathedral remembering the civilian deaths in the city during World War II (plus a friendly verger)
“I can’t quite believe the amazing part our house had in the past. Our connection with our home has become so enriched. All those people who have crossed the threshold and occupied the same spaces as us...our small Victorian house now has deep foundations in more than one sense.”
Amanda, Canterbury