History and booze in at a National Trust property in Hackney. Sutton House is not where you’d imagine a National Trust property would be found. It sits in the heart of urban London on a bend of Homerton High St and is almost surrounded by local authority housing.
We were taken on a candlelit tour of the house by a brilliant guide called Ray. There were two sources of light, one from street lamps and the other from flashes of blue neon from the ever present emergency vehicles. Yet, the glow of the candles gave me a small insight as to how dark life in the evening was before electricity. There must have been nothing to do except go to bed, perhaps the real reason there were do many births?
The tour took us thought the whole house, there are Elizabethan, Georgian and Victorian sections which each has it’s own story. What struck me most was the great job the National Trust has done in showing the checked history of the house. They have not been afraid to mix the modern with the 15th century. In the attic there is a mural painted by squatters who were there in the 1980’s. We were also shown where these squatters had taken an axe to the original Elizabethan door.