Behind that shopfront, however, is a structure several centuries older, and it took a structural crisis in 2008 to make clear quite how much history had been quietly holding itself together inside those walls. The gable wall and its diagonally set Jacobean chimney, a style associated with the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, had been slowly failing ever since nineteenth-century shopfront modifications shifted the load they were built to carry.

When restoration work began, archaeologists monitored the carefully sequenced dismantling and excavated the ground floor interior. What they found inside the fireplace alone told a long story: at least five distinct phases of use, the earliest corresponding to the original construction of the gable around AD 1600. That first fireplace was substantial, roughly 1.9 metres across and a metre deep, its floor laid with small rounded cobbles, and it grew progressively smaller with each successive rebuilding. The walls of the house are almost a metre thick, and the oak beams running horizontally through the south and west walls are enormous, measuring around 25 by 20 centimetres. Some of those timbers were dated by dendrochronology, the science of reading tree-ring growth patterns to establish when timber was felled, to 1672. A light connecting door in the attic also revealed that what are now two separate buildings, numbers 18 and 20, were originally a single house. The building has one further, unexpected layer of biography: in the nineteenth century it was home to Harriet Smithson, the Irish actress who became the wife of the French composer Hector Berlioz, and whose performance in Paris in the 1820s inspired his Symphonie Fantastique.