The perfect place for an oxymoron

By Julie Myerson, FT.com site

Published: Oct 13, 2007 

When we bought our home, a couple of years ago, it was divided, as so many old London houses are, into three flats. Though originally built as one large house - it's an old rectory and stands next to an awe-inspiring church designed by Sir John Soane - it hadn't been lived in like that, and certainly not by a family, since the early 1960s.

So, while the ground and first floor were one living space (for the rector), the enormous old basement, once kitchens, had been turned into offices, brutally divided up by flimsy plasterboard walls. And the old servants' quarters at the top of the house - destined to be our teenagers' space - had been converted into a self-contained flat. An ugly flight of concrete stairs had been added on the side of the house for access and, where there had once been an elegant sash window, there was now a cheap front door.

As soon as we knew the house was ours, we dreamed about how to put it all back together again. The basement was easy. The twisty stone stairs leading down from the hall had never really been closed off and the fake walls could soon be demolished. But what about the top flat? We knew that it had to connect in some way to the main house but it took us half an hour of knocking on walls to work out exactly where the old staircase must have once come down into the hall. So was it still there? It wouldn't have been demolished, surely, just covered over, waiting to be rediscovered? "If we put an axe through this wall here," said my husband, rapping his knuckles on a hollow-sounding wall, "I bet we'd find it."

And so on the day we moved in, before we'd even cracked open the champagne, that's just what we did. It was late October and late afternoon before all the removal men had left. The light was already going and the house was badly lit and gloomy as, after a lot of dust and a lot of noise, we prised the pieces of hardboard off in chunks so that a biggish hole appeared. Straight away I grabbed a torch and peered in - and gasped.

Because even though what we saw was exactly what we'd hoped to see, there was still something heart-stopping about coming face to face with a set of dusty wooden Victorian stairs that had stood undisturbed and in darkness for more than 50 years. Through the 1960s and 1970s and into the 1980s; through The Beatles and Punk and Thatcher and Blair; through all the endless daily comings and goings of this house, doors slamming, telephones ringing, laughter, talk, sleep; through all of this, those stairs had been sealed off in that dark space, unable to join in.

There's a quality of stillness that I've noticed in spaces that have been shut off for a long time - a numbing, cloth-like silence, an extreme and velvety quiet of a sort that you don't find anywhere else. The first time I experienced it was when I visited Saint Enodoc church in Cornwall, which became so neglected in the 18th and 19th centuries that sand blew up all around it until it was buried so deep that the only access was through a skylight. Walk in there and you can still feel 150 years of silence pressing on your ears.

Just a few miles from where we live, near London Bridge, there's also an old Victorian operating theatre in the roof space of a baroque church that was shut up some time in the last century and lay forgotten for 50-odd years before builders discovered it by accident. Now open to the public, it is a caustically silent space to visit. Go on a winter's day when the sky is heavy with snow and it's hard to raise your voice above a whisper in there.

And then, a few years ago, on a visit to Budapest, I came upon another of these incredible spaces. Saint Istvan's Cave Church at the foot of the Gellert Hill was sealed off behind an 8ft wall of concrete for 40 years until the Iron Curtain fell. It feels like a space that has had all sound pumped out. The silence in that cave is deafening.

The silence on our stairs dissolved and fell apart as soon as they were open, as soon as feet were placed on them, in fact. The first were my eldest son's - big feet in scuffed trainers, rushing upstairs to fetch his guitar. The second were the dog's - white paws with clicky claws, not strictly allowed upstairs but following him because, hey, we'd just moved in and all bets were temporarily off.

And so the old stairs were welcomed back into the world. Once we'd opened them up, we had no need for the ugly exterior door so we sealed it shut - much to the annoyance of our kids, who had quite fancied an extra escape route. And one day we might get around to pulling down the nasty concrete staircase but for now I've put a pot of hot, bright geraniums on every step.

The old stairs are meanwhile making up for lost time, as cats and dogs and teenagers belt up and down, stomp in and out, living out their lives on all levels. It's more than enough to make up for 50 years of silence.