Why Bother Digging Into the Past?

A wharfside barn is rarely just a barn. The chances are it has been a granary, a net store, a coal shed, a workshop, or all four in turn, and each of those lives has left its mark on the fabric of the building. Knowing what happened here matters before you start knocking walls about. It tells you which beams are original, which floor levels have been raised, where a doorway once sat, and why that odd patch of damp keeps returning in the north-west corner. It also gives you a story worth telling, and a story is what turns a renovation into a home rather than a project.

Research of this kind is genuinely enjoyable, and most of it can be done from an armchair before you ever pick up a chisel. Here is how to go about it.

Start With the Building Itself

Before you open a single archive box, walk the site slowly with a notebook. Old buildings give up their history quite willingly if you know what to look for.

• Blocked openings. Look for changes in brick bond, lintels sitting over solid wall, or stonework that does not match its surroundings. These often mark former doors, hatches or windows.
• Tie plates and dates. Iron plates on the gable ends sometimes carry initials and a year, particularly on eighteenth and nineteenth-century agricultural buildings.
• Roof structure. A surviving king-post truss suggests an earlier frame. Machine-cut timbers point to the Victorian period or later.
• Floor levels and thresholds. A wharfside building will often have been raised to keep goods above the tide. Look for a second threshold beneath the present one.
• Painted signs and graffiti. Faded lettering on internal walls sometimes names a former trader or gives a commodity, such as "corn" or "manure".

Photograph everything, including the bits you think are unimportant. You will refer back to these images constantly.

Maps Are Your Best Starting Point

Historical maps are the single most useful research tool available, and the good news is that most of what you need is free to view.

Begin with the tithe maps of the 1830s and 1840s. These came with an accompanying apportionment schedule listing every plot, its owner, its occupier and its use. If your barn stood alongside a wharf, the schedule will usually say so plainly, and it may name the field or yard as well.

Move on to the Ordnance Survey editions. The first series, from the 1840s to the 1880s, is wonderfully detailed at large scales and often marks cranes, wharves, quays and even the type of goods handled. Compare successive editions from the 1890s, 1900s and 1920s. Buildings that appear, change shape or vanish tell you a great deal about when your barn was extended or subdivided.

Do not overlook estate maps and enclosure awards, which sometimes pre-date the tithe survey by a century. A large landed estate often had its holdings mapped in the 1700s, and a wharfside building may appear there under a completely different name.

Title Deeds, Manorial Records and the Paper Trail

Title deeds are the obvious next step, though they are not always where you expect. Older deeds frequently rest with the solicitor who handled the last conveyance, with a mortgage lender, or in the county record office if the property once belonged to a larger estate.

Read them for the recitals, which is where the gold is. A recital of 1897 might summarise a conveyance of 1812, which in turn refers back to a lease of 1760. Deeds also give you occupiers' names, which you can then search for elsewhere.

If the property lay within a manor, manorial court rolls and copyhold records can trace ownership back to the sixteenth century in some places. These are held at county record offices and are usually indexed by name and sometimes by property.

Also worth checking are wills, probate inventories and land tax assessments. A probate inventory of a deceased wharfinger or corn merchant will often list the contents of the barn room by room, which is a rare and vivid insight into how the space was actually used.

Local Archives, Newspapers and Photographs

County record offices hold far more than most people expect. Ask the archivist for the catalogue entries for your parish, and search under the property name, the street name and any former owner's surname.

Local newspapers are another rich seam. A wharfside fire, a flood, a bankruptcy, a fatal accident or a new crane all made the papers, and each report places your building in a specific year and context. Many titles are now searchable online by keyword, and the British Newspaper Archive covers a remarkable range of regional papers.

Look too for photographic collections, postcards, sale particulars and insurance records. Fire insurance plans, drawn up by insurers in the nineteenth century, sometimes show individual buildings with astonishing precision. Old sale catalogues, often illustrated, describe the premises in glowing terms and mention every outbuilding by name.

Putting It All Together Before You Build

Once you have assembled your material, write a short chronology on a single sheet: date, event, source. It will quickly become the most useful document in the whole project.

Take it to your architect and your conservation officer early. Knowing that a timber is seventeenth-century, or that a wall once held a tidal sluice, changes what is possible and what will be permitted. It may also unlock grant funding, since historic building grants tend to favour properties with a demonstrable past.

Most of all, resist the urge to erase the quirks. A worn threshold, a patched beam, a bricked-up hatch: these are the very things that make a wharfside barn worth saving. Research them first, understand them properly, and the renovation will be all the better for it.