Days Out: Dennis Severs' House

Who used to live in a house like this?

Turn off dingy, bustling Commercial Road in east London on to the well-kept cobbles of Folgate Street and already time seems jumbled up. Step into Dennis Severs' House and past and present are shuffled even more thoroughly.

Described as "a time capsule – sometimes opened", the house invites guests to feel, sense and smell their way into the past.

It is "inhabited" by the Jervis family, prosperous Huguenot silk-weavers, whose everyday life has been disturbed by your entry. The front parlour has a portrait of Mr Jervis over the mantelpiece and the wig he is wearing is slung over one of the chairs.

It is apparent their meal has been interrupted, as food and half-full wine glasses are spread across the dining table. Voices can be heard from the kitchen downstairs, but when you arrive there via the creaking, candlelit staircase, the people talking have gone – though only recently, as smells of cooking fill the homely room, the fire is glowing in the range and clothing and household paraphernalia are scattered about. A black cat gazes at the embers in the grate.

Ascend from here, wander in and out of candlelit rooms and corridors, and you become aware of the passage of time in another way. As the 18th century progresses, the Jervis family prospers and the formal elegance of their first-floor drawing room reflects this, as do the sumptuously decorated bedchambers on the floor above.

Climb to the top floor and the mood changes dramatically as you enter the Victorian era and the collapse of the silk trade, which brought dreadful poverty to Spitalfields, where the house is set. The stairs leading to the two top-floor rooms are festooned with lines of clothes drying with difficulty in the damp atmosphere. Rotting food and half-full chamber pots jostle for position on the floor. The walls are filthy, the ceiling caving in.

The year is 1837 and a bell tolls for William IV. The crack of guns marks the accession of the teenage Queen Victoria, and the lowly inhabitants of this bedsit have just rushed out to witness the spectacle. The brutal poverty of 19th-century London becomes shockingly real after a few moments in these rooms.

Dennis Severs created his extraordinary house after buying the near-derelict property 30 years ago. He ignored architectural manuals and history books during the restoration, preferring to let his work be guided by imagination and instinct. Until his death in 1999, he lived without electricity or modern appliances, in much the same way as the Jervis family might have 250 years earlier.

Severs was hostile to any attempt to classify the experience his house offered, saying he was more interested in offering an atmosphere which the visitor could meet "halfway". The experience is as much about what you don't see as much as what you do, he said. To enter is to pass through a frame into a painting – one with a time and a life of its own.

Dennis Severs' House, 18 Folgate Street, London E1. (020-7247 4013). Open 9.30am-3pm, and Monday evening (booking essential), with times varying with the light of the seasons. Admission £12. Also open the first and third Sunday of each month 2pm-5pm, admission £8, and the first and third Monday, 12noon-2pm. Admission £5.