520 Bagot St

My mum grew up in a tidy but smoke-filled rowhouse on Jeune St in Oxford, England, just short of Magdalen Bridge and the botanical gardens, the aspiring steeples of the university. Bay windows up and down, and brick the colour of lemony flour. A knee high wall at the kerb (my dad sat waiting impatiently on that, I’m sure, tapping his long, thin foot). The sort of places that sell for a king’s ransom nowadays, but which back then seemed grey rather than yellow. For the longest time it was the sort of street where Mike Leigh might have set up his cameras and told people to pretend he wasn’t there. And then suddenly it wasn’t that sort of place at all.

There is no pure equivalent here, but there are certainly parts of Kingston’s downtown core that have gentrified in a similar way the last decade or so, and a few rows of workers’ cottages that remind me powerfully of home in England. 

We tend to forget that houses are built so that people can live close to their jobs. In the case of the red-brick townhomes on Bagot St both north and south of Raglan, back when this was Charlesville rather than Kingston proper, I imagine the most well-worn path was down to the Inner harbour and the Woolen Mill (actually a cotton mill back then). I picture a wall inside every front door marked up because everyone would lean against it while kicking off their boots.

Number 520 is north of Raglan on the west side. It’s where April Kinghorn bought for her and River a year ago (was it really that long?). I remember us in there for our walk-throughs after the deal was done, still slightly surprised maybe, that it had all worked out. This was when masks in public was still a new thing . A few weeks earlier we were down in the basement with the inspector. We’d all been driven underground, that’s how it felt to me. There was something weirdly apocalyptic about those moments. But there was relief too, at having secured a refuge at precisely the right moment.

The house sits about as proud and square as the day it went up. This time of year, mid-morning sun defrosts the front window glass and then rises up over the roof as if riding its own thermals. I looked over the old pictures before sitting down here today. Just to get a sense, a reminder of how damn pretty it is in there. The seams where white plaster meets wood are as wobbly as they are sublime.

I’m sure there have been wholesale changes this past year, just as there should be. New history is written whenever a house is sold and refurnished. Owners navigate differently from room to room and year to year; a fresh groove is worn into those honeyed lengths of pine. A long-lived house becomes a sort of index page to a dense collection of interconnected stories. What seems particularly marvellous to me is that kids have as much to do with the narrative as their parents. They are likely to take novel and roundabout routes from kitchen to bath, and to sneak entertainingly along walls and down the steep edge of stairs. It is the same way a river sets out, pulled seaward by gravity and curiosity both, and along the way imprints itself forever on the landscape.