Working out whether a cluster of Seymour Road houses are original or rebuilds

I get a slow but steady stream of email enquiries about a variety of local history matters. A couple of years back a gentleman named Norman from Leeds wrote to me explaining that he and a college friend had recently visited London to walk around some familiar old haunts in and around Hornsey. One of those places was Seymour Road in Harringay where one of the grandmothers of Norman's friend had lived. 

As they looked at the houses, the friend suggested that numbers 66, 68 and 70 had been destroyed in the war and rebuilt. For his evidence, he cited the missing plaster mouldings at the tops of the window pillars.

I'm not by any stretch of the imagination an architectural historian, but I know my way round Victorian and Edwardian domestic architecture quite well. I looked on Google Street View and compared the houses the friend had pointed out with the immediately neighbouring ones. The only visible difference between the supposedly rebuilt houses and their neighbours is the missing plaster mouldings. Everything else looks exactly the same, including all other architectural mouldings and the bricks. I also looked at Google maps satellite view and the 1955 Ordnance Survey map. Both show that the footprints of 66-70 match exactly those of the neighbouring houses.

My experience so far has been that all bombed out houses on the Ladder were rebuilt in a postwar style. So, I thought it highly unlikley that these houses had been rebuilt.

1. 66 and 64 Seymour Road (Image: Google Street View)

So, I confidently wrote and told Norman that in my opinion the houses could not have been destroyed and rebuilt and explained how I'd reached that conclusion. Bu-ut, you live and learn.

Re-filing some old emails the other day, I came across the correspondence with Norman and on re-reading it, paused to wonder if his friend might be interested in my Perrier Circle article about another house in Seymour Road. Looking that out to send Norman the link, my eyes grazed over the 1947 aerial photo I'd used there. I wondered why it hadn't previously occurred to me to find confirmation from that source for my opinion about the supposedly bombed out numbers 66, 68 and 70. So I looked out the source and this is what I found. 

2. The New River with Seymour Road right at the top of the picture in an extract from an RAF aerial photo taken on 10 May 1946 (courtesy of Historic England).

3. The New River with Seymour Road (the upper road) in an extract from an RAF aerial photo taken on 24 July 1947 (courtesy of Historic England).

Slam-dunk. Norman's friend was bang-on. The camera never lies (AI etc excluded!). In the 1946 photo (Fig. 2), it even looks like someone is using the bomb site as a car park! A crude ruler measurement of the photos shows that the bombsite is almost certainly equal to three houses. Those houses were destroyed and rebuilt.

I began wondering if there were more instances of undetectably rebuilt war-damaged houses on the Ladder. A pore over the three mid/late 1940s aerial photos that comprise the set suggests not. Apart from this Seymour Road example, I can only see evidence of destroyed houses on Sydney, Falkland/Fairfax and Wightman Roads, all of which are well-known locally and none of which were rebuilt in the original style. So, it appears that this example of  houses that were destroyed in the War and subsequently undetectably rebuilt in the original style may be unique.

I also looked again at Google Street View and couldn't quite believe how the 1950s builders had exactly rebuilt the three Seymour Road houses so exactly in the original style, complete with all but one element of the Victorian detailing. I had to see it for myself. So I popped over with my camera.

The first picture shows the best evidence, revealing a join in the old and new window sills.

4. Old (top) and new-meets-old (bottom) and the telling window sill join shown in exploded view. The bottom picture also shows the missing plaster mouldings on the window  pillars.

5. New front doors (left) and old front doors (right). My guess is that the blue door is original to the rebuild and that the 1950s builders skimped on the detail of matching the original Victorian doors as well as the pillar-top mouldings.

Something looks different about the proportion of those new doors and doorways too. The transom windows are definitely taller and seem to reach all the way to the first floor level, but the doors also look narrower. Is that an optical illusion?

Hats off to the craftsmanship of the 1950s builders. You never stop learning!