Case Nº 005 · Late 1700s–present · Hardingstone, Northamptonshire

The Grade II Birthday Present

The question

A client and her husband were buying a stone cottage on The Green at Hardingstone as their new home. She wanted its history bound and ready as a birthday surprise for him — starting with whether the house was even listed at all.

The search

1. Historic England confirmed the pair is Grade II — late-18th-century ashlar stone with a Welsh slate roof, first listed in 1976 — grouped with its neighbour under one entry, which is why an early search for the house number alone had missed it.

2. The 1910 valuation survey placed a bricklayer, his wife and their three sons in the house as tenants of the local estate; the youngest boy had been born there the year before.

3. The 1939 National Register found that same youngest son still living in the house thirty years on, now a man of thirty himself — one family, one cottage, the length of a working life.

The discovery

The house had passed through just a handful of hands in two and a half centuries — an estate tenancy, a wartime soldier’s home address, then a run of owners each adding their own room. The finished house biography leads with the listing the family didn’t know they had, and the youngest Woodbridge boy, born within its walls in 1909, features on its own page.