Heritage Talk – Time Travel Under My Floorboards

WEDNESDAY 8TH MAY, 1PM

This Heritage Event is at Eastwood House

‘Time Travel under my Floorboards: Vikings to Victorians’

(A Southside House History) by Paul Noble

In 1996 when my fiancé and I collected the keys to our soon to be marital home, a 1930’s semi-detached bungalow that lies in a sleepy, tree-lined avenue in the South Side of Glasgow, we could never have guessed that below its floorboards lay a treasure trove that links the house to people and places from times gone past.

For the next 26 years, while above the floorboards our family grew, from christenings to 21st parties and everything in between, below us in the crawl space dust settled over these long discarded relics.

Over the years I had occasion to visit this underworld, to run cables, fix leaks and generally crawl around in the dirt. However all I ever saw was rubbish & rubble and the odd giant spider.

Then in 2022 after retiring, on a whim, I decided to video a journey into the labyrinth. This was to be for the benefit of my family, so that for once they too could experience the joy of the crawl space!

The light from my phone illuminated into the darkest corners of the basement and through my filmographer’s eyes, objects previously pushed aside now jostled for my attention, and I gathered them up with wonder and amazement.

Resurrected from the depths and bathed in daylight for the first time in many, many years, I resolved to establish the provenance of each item, piece together their history and that of their original owners.

I could never have imagined the rollercoaster journey of discovery that I was about to be thrust into. Over the next two years I would witness, through the eyes of three separate Glasgow families, the transformation of their environment from a rural farming community, through the Industrial Revolution, into the modern suburbia it is today.

So join me as I share my investigations into their worlds and learn what I now know about my house, the land it stands upon, and those that have owned, lived and worked on and around that land.

Ticket information

In response to the current cost of living crisis, we have decided to offer tickets for this event as ‘Pay What You Can’ to allow participation by people who might find cost a barrier. We hope this makes the event more accessible to those who want to come. These tickets will be sold purely on an honour system – we will trust that those who do not need the discount will not use up the limited supply.