Dressing up in historical costume for our cover shoot is a first for Professor David Olusoga. While some TV historians never seem to be out of period dress, Olusoga isn’t one of them. “I don’t look like someone from the past,” he explains. “I look very much like someone from the 21st century. I never get to do the dressing up that some historians do.”
Why did they pick the Scottish capital for this sixth series? “We had done enough English cities. I made a big series for the BBC three years ago [Union with David Olusoga], and I felt that we’d be contributing to the forces that are pulling the union apart if we did another English city. And as much as I admire Georgian Glasgow, Edinburgh was the city I’ve been going to since I was a young child. Edinburgh has its own architecture and vernacular.”
He glances out of the window. We are sitting on the fourth floor of an industrial building in north London overlooking terraces and squares built in the early 19th century. “One of the things that has been demonstrated in the decades since is that homes built in the 18th and 19th century have something many modern homes don’t: they are incredibly adaptable. They could be modernised when electricity came. They could be transformed with basements and extensions.”
Fortunately, the house on Calton Hill was not knocked down to make way for a motorway. Built in 1765, its past residents include French prisoners of war, bagpipe makers, a spy, a brothel-keeper, folk singers who played with the Proclaimers and the sculptor of Edinburgh’s famous statue of Sir Walter Scott.
“History used to be regarded as the stories of great men – Napoleon, Wellington, Churchill – and nothing else mattered. But history has got bigger. We now have women’s history, the history of the people of Empire and the history of ordinary people. Thanks to shows like Who Do You Think You Are?, millions of us are genealogists. Every time A House through Time goes out, people tell us they are researching their homes. They have done their genealogy.”
But he had no leg-up onto the property ladder. Born in 1970 in Lagos to a Nigerian father and white British mother, Olusoga migrated to the UK at the age of five with his mother and three siblings, growing up on a council estate in Gateshead. At the local primary school he was protected from racist bullying by one Paul Gascoigne, three years his senior.
“I spend a lot of my time writing and talking about social housing because the state of social housing is one of the worst legacies of the Thatcher government. An ideological position was taken against it, and we are still living with the consequences,” he says, referring to Margaret Thatcher’s policy of offering tenants the right to buy their homes. Millions of council houses were sold off in this way.
David Olusoga is atypical, but not just because he’s a Black historian who grew up on a council estate and now works for the BBC. He’s also a distinguished academic who reached the final round of The Celebrity Traitors. He grins. “Yes, having me on Traitors was counter-intuitive, but how many times in life are you going to be asked to push a Trojan horse up a Scottish mountain beside Stephen Fry?
“It’s the only reality show I would consider doing, and I have turned down quite a few. And doing well was a total fluke. Everyone who knows me, told me I would be terrible at this game, and I thought I’d be terrible.”
“My mother was British, but nationality is patrilineal. When I was first in this country, I was Nigerian. I was naturalised British later in life. But we had social housing. I went to Liverpool University. The local education authority, for all its faults, gave me help when it diagnosed my dyslexia. I arrived as a little boy from Nigeria and this country, with a lot of help from my mother, invested in me. Turning an honour down would be a snub. And I don’t want to snub a country that I became a citizen of, and which is my nation.”
Indeed, without that support, things might have turned out very differently, certainly with regards to his TV career. “If I had known how elitist television was, I don’t think I would have attempted to break into it,” he says. “It was my lack of worldliness that made me think that I had a chance.”
“The BBC isn’t the worst offender. Channel 4 is more elitist, more middle class, more dominated by Oxbridge. There is a phrase in the media: ‘people from non-traditional backgrounds’. There shouldn’t be a traditional background for a job that is supposed to be based on merit. That is an acknowledgement of a profound failure of an industry that everyone has a stake in, yet not everyone is represented by. We are paying the price for having decided jobs in the media are for the upper-middle classes.”
“I have a shelf at home full of books sent to me by people who have researched their house and then got the book self-published. To have inspired other people to go to the archives – not to use secondary sources but to actually engage in making history, drawing out the details and the people – that is the thing I’m most proud of in my career.”
The connection between past and present: it’s all there in a small Edinburgh house, seen through time.
The residents of Calton Hill
David Olusoga uncovers some of the fascinating characters who have lived at the Edinburgh home
The Reverend William Fitzsimmons was a pillar of the establishment and among the first residents in Calton Hill. He helped a group of French prisoners of war who had been captured and imprisoned in Edinburgh Castle escape to France, and was subsequently put on trial for treason.
The son of a wood carver who also lived at the house on Calton Hill in the early 19th century, John Steell Junior avoided the financial struggles that had plagued his father. He became a lauded sculptor, creating three public statues in Edinburgh, including the famous one of Sir Walter Scott on Princes Street. He was later knighted by Queen Victoria, whose own statue sculpted by Steell sits atop the Royal Scottish Academy.
An office clerk who lived on Calton Hill in the mid-19th century, Archibald Burns became fascinated by photography during its early years. His hobby grew so consuming that he left his day job to run one of Edinburgh’s first photographic studios. He documented the demolition of condemned slums in Edinburgh’s Old Town, leaving behind the only photographic record of medieval buildings and street layouts that disappeared as the city was redeveloped.
An enterprising and astute businesswoman in the late 19th century, Catherine Johnston ran a brothel – then known as a “house of ill repute” – in the basement flat of the Calton Hill building. A frequent presence in Edinburgh’s courts, she evaded both the law and modern-day historians, disappearing almost entirely from the historical record.
“I think it’s wonderful,” says Olusoga of her ability to leave little record of her life. “She lied to the police and the court authorities about her age and gave them false information. She didn’t want to be on their radar during her lifetime, which means she was equally capable of evading the detection work of historians. She left us only flashesof detail.”
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