About Us

The House Archive is a wiki website devoted to houses in the UK - their histories, their development, their styles, and the people who have lived in them. It is an archive because it is a collection of items of information of historic and cultural interest (whether that interest be national or local).

A wiki is a website that anyone can edit and add content to, and this website encourages everyone to add information about their own house, or any other house they have lived in or have an interest in. You don't need any special skills to create a page or add content - just basic word processing skills. The site is not particularly for large houses or listed buildings - but for houses that  ordinary people live in and appreciate.

The UK has more houses of interest than just about country in the world; 6 million of our houses (about 25% of the total) were built before 1900 and many of these as well as more recently-built houses have an interesting past and architectural or historic merit at a local or national level.

We welcome contributions from individuals, local history groups and collaborative projects from schools, local neighbourhoods or those campaigning on behalf of the preservation of our built environment. We particularly welcome contributions of photographs, drawings or paintings of houses, streets or neighbourhoods. Your contribution could be about a particular house, a particular street or an area of a town or city that is of interest to you and the local community.

This site was started because we bought and renovated a house some years ago and discovered that the house had an interesting past. It occurred to us that there must be  people who know something of the history of the house who could tell us about it and maybe show us old pictures of the house. But we didn't know how to contact them.

We created this website because we realised there must be many others in this position - either knowing about the past of houses others now live in, or wishing to know about the past of the house they currently live in. This website can bring these people together. Our experience of buying a house of some interest also demonstrated that estate agents often do a very poor job of presenting the merits of an interesting house in their particulars; by putting information on this site you may be able to demonstrate the innate interest, uniqueness and value of your house when you come to sell it.

Our hope is that, over time, this website will become a valuable resource for all those interested in local history, domestic architecture, or our built environment in general.