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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.”
So which era of costume is his favourite? “High Victorian. I adore Dickens,” he says. Fortunately, as part of his Radio Times session, Olusoga has just stepped out of a sculptor’s waistcoat, jacket and boots from that period. The outfit is inspired by the craftsman who once lived in the Edinburgh house featured in the latest run of A House through Time, the BBC documentary series in which Olusoga traces the lives of the past inhabitants of a single property to reveal wider social histories.
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.”
The house in question stands on Calton Hill, between the city’s medieval Old Town and the Georgian New Town. Its survival is something of a miracle. “It’s true for almost all of the houses in this series,” says Olusoga. “So many which are now regarded as historical jewels were once earmarked for demolition during the age of what was called ‘comprehensive redevelopment’ – the 1950s, 60s, and 70s. Thousands of beautiful Georgian and Victorian houses were demolished.”
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.”
Olusoga clearly loves a period house. Is he, I wonder, also a fan of Brutalism? “No, I’m not. We made some very bad buildings in the 1960s and 1970s. But more than architecture, it was about planning: the idea that cities had to be rewired for the car.” Giant motorways ploughing through city centres, streets ripped up for car parks, that sort of thing. Olusoga hates it. “The false belief that cities should bow to the automobile.”
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.
One house, so much history. How was it chosen? “We find 10 houses that could potentially work, then we decide which three to intensively research.” Of course, the show isn’t about the building, it’s about the people who lived there. “It uses houses as vehicles to tell human stories. It tells social history through the story of a single house.
“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.”
Part of the appeal of A House through Time is that it allows viewers to peek inside other people’s homes. Olusoga, professor of public history at the University of Manchester, smiles. “There is an obsession with property because it’s growing in value so much,” he says.
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.
“I look at my family and how we lived in the 1970s and there was lots wrong with our estate. But if it was now, we wouldn’t be in one. We’d be living in a B&B. On an estate, my mother was able to get her children educated. She could convince us that we could have aspirations. Social housing was affordable, and we had affordable access to university. A few weeks ago my younger brother Peter [a chartered psychologist], got his first book contract. That will be the tenth book written by me and my siblings.”
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.”
Another surprising fact is that Olusoga, whose work has often been critical of the British Empire, accepted an OBE in 2019 for services to history and community integration. He snorts. “I’m often told by privileged white middle-class people that it’s a terrible thing for a Black person to accept an OBE, and I think they underestimate what it means. It’s a different thing for somebody who is an immigrant to turn down a national honour than it is for someone who was born here.
“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.”
Now in his mid-fifties, the Bafta-winning historian has been working in television for more than 20 years. Has the industry changed? “I gave a lecture six years ago [at the Edinburgh TV Festival] about race and class in the media. I don’t think anything has changed since. If you have newsrooms or production crews in which everybody went to the same sort of schools and the same two universities, you get a world where there are no working-class people.
“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.”
Olusoga is something of a rarity: a television celebrity with a real university job. He also gets stopped in the street. Is that because of The Celebrity Traitors? “Most people who stop me in the street do so because they love A House through Time. Of all the shows I have ever made, this is the one people have made part of their life.
“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.”
Will that be his legacy? He laughs. “One thing history teaches you is that most people are forgotten, and I think historians are about the most forgettable people there are.” Then he quotes one. “I think of what the historian GM Trevelyan said: ‘The poetry of history lies in the quasi-miraculous fact that once on this earth… walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions.’”
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 TREASONOUS MINISTER
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 ROYAL SCULPTOR
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.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY PIONEER
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.
THE ELUSIVE BROTHEL OWNER
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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