How to research the history of your house at Southampton Archives

Maps are a good place to start researching your house, as they can give you an idea of when your house was first built, as well as show what occupied the site before.

Our most extensive collection of maps is our Ordnance Survey maps. We hold copies of OS maps dating from 1846 to the 1970s, although the maps vary in scale and the areas they cover. The collection includes the 1845-46 Survey of the Borough of Southampton, which is detailed, at a scale of 60 inches to the mile, and in some cases shows street numbering. It also includes an 1870 map which can be used to trace houses in the central area of town and is the only map to name some of the courts and alleyways which ran through the old town, and copies of a 50” map published after the Second World War which is useful for tracing the course of post-war rebuilding and confirming house numbers.

Other maps in our reading room include 19th-century parish tithe maps for the parishes of North Stoneham, South Stoneham, Millbrook, Nursling, St Mary’s Extra, St Mary’s infra, and All Saints. Tithe maps include schedules listing owners and occupiers of properties, and descriptions of said properties. We also hold enclosure maps for Woolston and Bitterne dating from 1814, and Hill and Shirley dating from 1830, and parliamentary plans with accompanying local Acts of Parliament, which were obtained for major works including public buildings.

Street directories are one of the most important house history resources available. They list, by street, every house within the boundaries of Southampton during a given year, as well as who the head of household was. They also contain lists of local businesses and tradespeople. Street directories enable you to find out when your house was built, who has lived there over the decades, and how the surrounding area developed.

We hold directories published by Kelly’s, the Post Office, and other firms, dating from 1803-1975, with some gaps. There are also directories available at the Local Studies and Maritime Library at Southampton Central Library, and a selection are available as part of the Local History and Maritime Digital Archive on the council website.

Electoral records are useful if you are looking for more information on who lived at a particular property, as they show not just the head of household but anyone who was registered to vote. They are organised according to electoral ward, meaning that you will need to know which ward your house would have been in at the time in order to use them effectively. If you cannot find your house in the register, it may be because the occupiers were not registered to vote, or because the area your house is in wasn’t part of Southampton at the time.

We hold electoral registers for the periods 1832-1918 and 1930 to the present. Information can be limited in the case of the earlier registers, which were produced before universal suffrage was introduced.

Burgess lists (1835-1915), which were used for local elections, are a useful way of filling the gaps in the early registers, as they list properties and their owners, meaning that women are included if they owned property in the town.

The Public Health Act of 1875 gave local authorities powers to regulate the construction of new buildings and alterations made to existing ones. Property owners were obliged to submit plans to Building Control.

We hold Building Control registers and plans of individual properties, though plans for minor alterations, such as the building of garages, do not survive. As with electoral registers, which properties are included in the registers varies depending on whether or not a property was within the town boundaries at the time the register was produced.

Please note that plans less than 75 years old can only be seen by the owner (who must provide proof of address) or with written permission of the owner.

If your house was built by the council, we may hold a plan for it in our Borough Architect and Engineer’s plans. The plans in these collections are fairly detailed, showing types of houses, road layouts, sewers, and other services, as well as contracts.

Finding plans can be time-consuming, and the process can be further complicated if a road had not been named at the time the building application was made, or the property only had a plot number.

If your property was built on land at one time owned by the council, then we may hold title deeds connected to it. The council once held considerable land and property in Southampton, and many of the resultant deeds (from c.1275 onwards) and leases (from 1378 onwards) are held as part of our collections.

The rate books are an excellent source for tracing changes in ownership or occupation of a property. They were compiled to keep a record of the rate assessment of individual properties, based on the yearly value of the property.

The level of information included in rate books varies, but they usually give the names of owners and occupiers of a property, as well as the amount they were rated. The earlier books are not as detailed as the later ones, listing only the street a property appeared on, but later books include individual houses, numbers and names. Some of the later books will also give a description of the property.

We hold two main series of rate books: Board of Guardians poor rates books and Borough Treasurer’s rate books. The Board of Guardians rate books are divided into the following parishes and areas, with the following covering dates:

• Old town: 1732-1908
• Shirley Parish: 1906-1914
• North Stoneham Parish: 1835-1930
• South Stoneham Parish: 1839-1920
• Itchen Urban District Council: 1914-1920

The Borough Treasurer’s rate books, meanwhile, list general rate and water rates. They are arranged into different books for different areas, and date from the 1920s to the 1950s. You will need to allow for changes to the town’s boundaries, so if there isn’t a book for your area, it is because the area was not within the boundaries of Southampton during the year in question.

We hold sales catalogues for some individual properties and for large estates which were broken up for housing. Some of the catalogues include in-depth information about the building, right down to descriptions of each room, and in some cases, there are even photographs of the property. The catalogues will sometimes also be annotated with details of the purchaser and the price they paid.

You can search for sales plans and catalogues using the indexes in our reading room.

During the Second World War, well over 44,000 incidents were recorded of damage done to properties in Southampton. Southampton Archives have several sources available which you can use to find out if your house was one of the buildings affected. These include a bomb damage map showing exactly where and when bombs fell, photographs of damage done to some properties, and files related to the rebuilding of certain properties, which often include letters and specifications.

We also hold war damage cards, which are useful for finding out if your house was bombed during the war and, if so, when and at what level repairs were carried out. They also enable you to study the impact the Blitz had on your area, giving you information as to which properties were destroyed and how this affected the development of both your street and nearby roads.

We hold an extensive war damage card collection, organised alphabetically according to street name. Each card provides a damage classification, for which there is a guide in our reading room. The cards sometimes list the owner of the house and the number of living and bedrooms in the property, as well as the date the building was repaired and a description of the work. Please note that the level of information varies from card to card, so the information you can gain about your house from these records will depend on what was written on the card at the time.

Finally, we hold photographs of streets and houses, giving you a snapshot of what they would have looked like at the time the picture was taken. Many of the photographs in our collections are indexed alphabetically according to location. There are also large collections of photographs of streets and houses in our Borough Architect and Engineers’ department records and our Health Department collections, which include photographs of buildings which were marked for slum clearance.

Many photographs of Southampton can be found in the Local History and Maritime Digital Archive.