A listing description is written by an inspector who has been inside, and it is a legal document that defines what is protected. Mine names a small panelled chamber to the north of the stair hall, and there is no chamber.
We bought the house in 2016. It is Grade II, seventeenth century with an eighteenth century front, five bedrooms, and it has eaten every penny we have.
The listing is worth explaining because people think it is a plaque.
A listed building has an entry on the National Heritage List. The entry has a date, a grade, and a description written by an inspector who visited. The description is not decorative: it is what the designation means in law, and when you apply for listed building consent, the officer reads it and so do you.
Ours was listed in 1953 and the description was revised in 1987, which is normal. The 1987 revision is longer and clearly written by somebody who went round the inside with a notebook.
The description has a sentence in it about a room we do not have.
I am going to paraphrase it, because quoting it would identify the house, and it says this: to the north of the stair hall, a small panelled chamber retaining original bolection moulded panelling and a moulded cornice, with a blocked window to the north.
To the north of our stair hall there is a wall.
Behind that wall, according to every plan I have, is the outside.
The stair hall is in the middle of the house. It runs north to south with the stair against the east wall. At the north end there is a plastered wall with a door in it to the kitchen passage, and that passage runs west.
North of the stair hall, past that wall, is a two metre strip of ground and then the boundary wall with the lane behind it.
There is no room there and there is nowhere for one to be. I have stood in the lane with a tape.
What I have done about it, in the order I did it.
Rang the local authority conservation officer in 2017, in the ordinary way, because we wanted to replace a window and I was reading the description properly for the first time.
She was helpful and slightly amused and said inspectors do make errors, and that the 1987 revision would have been done at some speed, and that a description mentioning a feature that is not there is not unheard of.
I asked whether it could be corrected. She said an amendment application is possible and is a lot of work for no benefit, and that I should not worry about it, and that nobody would ever enforce against me for the absence of a room.
That is correct advice and it is what I would tell somebody else.
The 1953 entry.
I got it out of the archive. Listings from the fifties are terse, often two lines, and ours is four.
It does not mention a panelled chamber.
So somebody, between 1953 and 1987, went into this house and wrote down a room with bolection panelling, a moulded cornice and a blocked window, to the north of the stair hall.
An inspector describing a house does not invent a room. They describe what is in front of them, which is why the 1987 revision also correctly names the bread oven, the chamfered beam in the parlour, and the eighteenth century staircase with its column-on-vase balusters, all of which are here and all of which are exactly as written.
Everything else in that description is right.
The wall.
I have been at the north wall of the stair hall with everything a homeowner can reasonably own.
It sounds solid. It is solid: I have drilled it, twice, in places where a drilled hole does not matter, and it is lath and plaster on the room side and then something dense.
The thermal camera shows nothing behind it except the temperature you would expect for an external wall on a north elevation.
I hired a surveyor with ground penetrating radar in 2021, which cost nine hundred pounds and which my wife has still not entirely forgiven.
His report says the north wall of the stair hall is a solid masonry wall approximately six hundred millimetres thick with no detectable void beyond it, and that beyond the wall the returns are consistent with soil.
The chimney.
There is one detail I have never been able to file away.
The house has four flues and three fireplaces. The fourth flue comes down inside the north wall of the stair hall, and it is capped at the top and it does not serve anything on any floor.
A flue serves a fireplace. A capped flue in a wall means there was a fireplace and it was removed and the opening plastered over, which is the commonest thing in the world in a house of this age.
A fireplace in the north wall of the stair hall would face north, into the wall.
Unless the fireplace was on the other side of it.
What we do now.
Nothing. That is the honest end of it and it is the same answer I have got to every time, over nine years.
The description stays as it is, because amending it means an application, and an application means an officer visiting, and an officer visiting means somebody with a statutory duty standing in my stair hall reading a description of a room and asking me where it is.
And I have thought many times about what I would say, and the best I have is that the inspector must have been mistaken.
The only thing that has changed is small and my wife noticed it before I did.
We put a bookcase against that wall in 2019, a big one, the length of it, and I filled it, and I have never once said why, and she has never once asked.