Who is popular today?

David Olusoga’s answer to Who Do You Think You Are? returns, charting the inhabitants of a Bristol dwelling funded by slave-trading and telling stories which need to be heard
A House Through Time (BBC2) has always been an oasis of calm. Partly because of presenter David Olusoga’s permanent air of absolute tranquillity (some people may find it bordering on soporific – I feel more as though he’s enabling me to let the edges of the scene blur and melt) and partly because its subject – unlike the messy humanity of Who Do You Think You Are? – is essentially neutral. The house whose history is under discussion is blessedly silent. It is the place to which we all return after the story of each of its owners or tenants is told, to gather our thoughts, digest what we have learned and mull the wider implications before setting out again down a new avenue.
For series three, the focus is on an older house than usual. Number 10 Guinea Street in Redcliffe, Bristol – Olusoga’s home town since the 1990s – is a gracious three-storey (plus attic, plus basement), ornately plastered, beautifully panelled and flagstoned pile built, along with several others, by a Captain Edmund Saunders in 1718. And, like most gracious three-storey piles built by sea captains in Bristol in the 18th century, it was funded by fortunes made from slave trading. Continue reading...