Time and rooms are changing

2:43pm Friday 4th April 2008

TAKE a timber-framed house from the 15th century with a hearth set in the middle of the floor and a hole in the roof to let out some of the smoke.

Add a floor in the 15th century and build a fireplace on the side of the kitchen area on what is now the ground floor, with a chimney stack for the smoke to escape through.

The 16th century inhabitants, proud of their home and keen to show they are better than the Joneses next door, add a wing or two and perhaps replace the wattle and daub between the timbers with bricks.

And so the changes continue.

Stucco is placed over the original walls, hiding the timbers.

A third floor and a new roof is added. Walls are knocked down, or built up.

Now, in the 21st century, it is near-impossible to discern what the original building looked like.

A great place to visit if you want to see what buildings were really like in the past is the Weald and Downland Museum near Chichester, Sussex.

Dotted across vast areas of attractive parkland are 50 buildings from the 13th to 19th century, restored to how they were at a particular period in their history.

There is nothing Disneyland about it.

Each of the buildings, which include houses, shops and barns, is the real thing, dismantled where it originally stood, conserved and rebuilt in its original form.

Some have been furnished inside or contain items like agricultural equipment. Most have photographs of what they looked like before they were restored.

It's a great day out - but if you want to study a few places nearer to home, here are a couple of examples.

QUEEN Elizabeth's Hunting Lodge in Rangers Road, Chingford, was actually built for King Henry VIII. Originally it was nothing more than an open-sided grandstand so that the royals and their guests could watch deer hunts on Chingford Plain.

After the reign of Charles I in the mid 16th century, the galleries were filled in, windows created and by the 18th and 19th centuries the lodge housed the under keeper of Chingford Walk and his family.

In the late 20th century, it became a private museum, which was opened to the public in 1928.

In the meantime, the building has undergone many changes, the most recent leaving it simply limewashed and perhaps at its most attractive for centuries.

An even older building is the so-called Ancient House in Walthamstow Village, which was built on the medieval hall plan in the 15th century, as described earlier.

A floor was inserted around 1600 and a chimney added to the rear wall.

Since then the house has enjoyed, or endured, many transformations.

It was turned into shops at the beginning of the 19th century when it was shrouded in weatherboarding, converted back to domestic use in 1973 and underwent a major restoration only a few years ago.

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