How to find the history of your house in the UK

Get the title from HM Land Registry

In England and Wales, HM Land Registry sells the title register and title plan for any registered property for a small fee. The register names the current owner, the price paid, and covenants and easements that often date from when the house was built. Registration only became compulsory across England and Wales in 1990, so for older transfers ask the owner, lender or conveyancer for the pre-registration deeds, which can run back a century or more. In Scotland the equivalent is Registers of Scotland, whose Register of Sasines goes back to 1617.

Check the heritage lists

If the house is listed, its entry on the National Heritage List for England gives a date and a description of the building. Even if it is not, Heritage Gateway searches the local Historic Environment Records, which log buildings, finds and excavations street by street. In Wales use Coflein and in Scotland Canmore.

Trace the address through the census and the 1939 Register

The census was taken every ten years from 1841 (1801–1831 survive only as counts), and the 1921 census is the latest released; the 1931 returns were destroyed in a fire in 1942 and there was no 1941 census. The 1939 Register, taken on the eve of the war, fills that gap with every household by address. FamilySearch indexes most English and Welsh censuses for free; the 1921 census and the 1939 Register are on subscription sites, free to use at The National Archives. Scottish returns are on ScotlandsPeople.

Read the electoral registers and directories

Electoral registers list the adults entitled to vote at each address, year by year — far finer than the census. Your local archive or library holds the run for your area, and the British Library holds a national set. Trade directories such as Kelly's list the head of the household street by street from the nineteenth century.

Find the tithe map and the old Ordnance Survey maps

The tithe surveys of around 1836–1850 mapped most parishes in England and Wales field by field, with an apportionment naming the owner, occupier and use of every plot. Copies are at The National Archives and county record offices, and many are digitised. The National Library of Scotland has free Ordnance Survey maps for all of Great Britain from the 1840s to the 1950s, side by side with a modern map: the first edition your house appears on dates it.

Visit the local archive

County record offices and local studies libraries hold what no website does: deposited deeds, rate books, sale particulars, building control plans and the 1910 Valuation Office survey (the “Lloyd George Domesday”), which described almost every property in England and Wales; its field books are at The National Archives. Local history societies often already know your street. Old newspapers at the British Newspaper Archive are worth searching for the house's name or address.

What was here before my house?

Work back through the Ordnance Survey editions to the first, around the 1880s for the 25-inch maps, then to the parish tithe map and any enclosure map, which can show your plot as part of a named field. Heritage Gateway's Historic Environment Records list archaeology found near your street, and the British Geological Survey's Geology Viewer shows what the ground itself is made of.

What Strata does — and what it does not

Strata is an iPhone app that writes a sourced history of the exact spot you are standing on. In the UK it reads the National Heritage List for England and other heritage records, historic events, the people and buildings tied to that ground, old maps and the geology underneath, and writes them into one story with every record linked to its source.

It does not read Land Registry titles, census returns or electoral registers for your address, so it will not tell you who owned or lived in your house. The steps above will. What it gives you, in about a minute, is what that ground has seen.

Real pages from the library

Questions people ask