‘Houses with long histories are magical’: David Olusoga on the home history show that’s gripped the UK

. UK edition

Prof David Olusoga sits on stone steps, arms crossed, in an alley
‘The architecture of Edinburgh is special’ … David Olusoga in the Scottish capital for his new BBC Two series of A House Through Time. Photograph: BBC/Twenty Twenty Productions Ltd/Richard Ranken

At first, I worried that only historians would find A House Through Time compelling. But its appeal is so enduring that fans of the show stop me in the street to ask when they can watch more

Why is that some TV programmes find an audience, catch people’s imaginations and become not just watched but loved? Most of course do not. Having been making TV since my late 20s and been involved in a number of “first” series that ended up being the only series, I am painfully aware of that. If producers knew in advance which shows would be hits, there would be no flops, as the industry cliche goes.

Producers and presenters are lucky if, during our careers, we get to be involved in a single show that makes that rare transition from being part of the schedule to part of people’s lives. Almost a decade ago, while we were filming the first series of A House Through Time for BBC Two, I was not at all convinced that this was a show that had the potential to break through.

Having studied urban history for my master’s, I always loved the central premise: that we could explore the histories of Britain’s great cities through the people who had lived in a single house, from the very first resident right up to the current owners. Likewise, I was, from the start, enamoured of the astonishing array of human stories which the brilliant teams that worked on the series managed to unearth.

I liked the way the history of the house in that first series, 62 Falkner Street in Liverpool’s Georgian Quarter, perfectly followed the broader history of Liverpool: the city’s rapid rise to wealth and power as the great port of empire, its devastation in the blitz, then a precipitous postwar decline that saw 62 Falkner Street become a warren of slum apartments seemingly doomed for demolition only to be reprieved by the gentrification of the early 21st century.

However, I was concerned that audiences would struggle to understand why we had locked ourselves into the straitjacket of a single house. Why were we viewing the past through such a tiny aperture? What were we missing by being so tightly focused? At times during the scripting and the filming of that first series, I worried that perhaps I was too close to the subject and that only historians of the city would find the show compelling. I was, it turned out, doing what TV producers are infamous for doing. I was underestimating the audience.

This month, almost 10 years after the first series was commissioned, series six of A House Through Time goes to air. We have now made 24 hour-long episodes that have explored the hidden histories of houses in Liverpool, Newcastle, Bristol, Leeds, London, Berlin and now Edinburgh.

Like everyone who presents TV shows, I am regularly stopped on the street by people who recognise me from their screen. Most often what they want to talk about is A House Through Time. Amazingly, that remains the case even after I appeared on the great TV juggernaut of our time: The Celebrity Traitors. The first question I am asked by the fans of A House Through Time is almost always the same: when is the next series coming out? So I am left to wonder why a show about which I had doubts has been such a hit. What had I not appreciated 10 years ago?

What I didn’t get back then, above all, is what old houses mean to the people who live in them. Houses with long histories are magical places. Anyone who has ever lived in such a house has, on a sleepless night or perhaps after too many glasses of wine, found themselves wondering who else had lived out their life in those same rooms. Whose hands once gripped the same banisters; who, like you, knew where the creaky floorboard was and which windows would start rattling on a windy night?

A House Through Time reveals – in incredible detail – the sorts of human stories that would tumble out of our own home if only we had the time to go looking. It reminds us that houses have longer lives than we do. That no matter how many years or decades we live in them, our time there represents a single chapter in their far longer story.

After making 24 hours of A House Through Time, and with the TV industry in a less healthy state than it was a decade ago, I also now appreciate, more than ever, that it is one of those shows that only TV could make.

Only TV – and let’s be more specific, only public service TV – would invest the time and money needed to uncover history at this level of granularity. Only TV would believe that the stories of ordinary people – not kings or presidents or movie stars – could grip audiences of millions. And only TV is capable of assembling teams of specialist researchers, assistant producers, producer/directors, series producers and executive producers with the skills needed to track down the thousands of documents that become the jigsaw pieces that make up the bigger historical puzzle.

In every series, breakthroughs have arrived at the last minute, often in the last weeks of filming, all because an assistant producer or a researcher, digging in the archives and working far beyond the call of duty, has located a missing link or noticed a tiny detail that answers a nagging question or confirms a long-held suspicion.

This new series follows the same pattern but in a new nation. I have long wanted to take A House Through Time to Scotland, and series six is set in an 18th-century house up on Calton Hill in Edinburgh. The Scottish capital was hard to resist. Edinburgh is one of the handful of cities that are not just architecturally but also topographically breathtaking. Built around a castle that sits on top of an extinct volcano, with other volcanic features looming on the horizon, Edinburgh is up there with Cape Town, Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro when it comes to the sheer drama of its setting.

The architecture of Edinburgh is similarly special. Encircled by city walls, Edinburgh had a scarcity of space that meant the only direction in which to build was up. The result was a vertical city of stone tenements, some rising to 10 or more floors. Edinburgh has been described as a medieval Manhattan. When it comes to urban density and vertical living, it has more in common with Prague and Stockholm than it does with most English cities. Our house, up on Calton Hill, is one of Edinburgh’s smaller tenements – a stolid stone structure built over five floors.

As with the previous series, the life stories of the people who lived in those rooms are diverse and idiosyncratic. Among the earliest tenants was a man at the centre of one of the strangest trials in Edinburgh’s history, having committed a crime so bizarre and infamous that it was depicted in engravings that were sold on the city streets. Another resident took up arms, joining a volunteer regiment during the fraught and divided years after the French revolution, when the elite and the middle classes saw the spectre of revolution in every darkened corner.

One of our Victorian residents was a woman who, more than any of the figures from the past who have appeared in any of the previous series, successfully eluded the efforts of the production team to pin down her story. Why was she so elusive? Perhaps because she converted the house into what Edinburgh police records rather delicately describe as “a house of ill-fame”. Another of our 19th-century residents was a sculptor who created monuments that are still peppered across the Edinburgh cityscape, statues I have been walking past since I was brought to the city as a child in the 1970s.

If there is another reason to explain why A House Through Time has caught on it is that the series plays a small part in a bigger story: the expansion of history. History has for decades been getting bigger and more inclusive. History is no longer just about “great men”. The emergence of social history, working-class history, women’s history and imperial history has uncovered the lives of people once deemed of little interest. The genealogy revolution has made millions of people into amateur historians. Today our ancestors – all of them, no matter how humble their lives – are deemed worthy of study and remembrance.