Please, sir, I want some more.

I don't know the full history of the building I live in.

The main part went up c. 1860, one of a grand block of elegant granite homes inhabited by Boston 19th century gentry. In 1919, the owners decided that the place wasn't large and grand enough, and they added a fifth floor and considerable square footage to the back of the building. My unit is in the back section, and I can attest to the fact that the owners went all-in on making the back of the place as grand as the front. My living room has beautiful woodwork, a majestic fireplace, and a plaster medallion ceiling. (The motif on the medallians is grapes, which matches the carvings at the crown of the majestic fireplace.)

I believe my building stayed a grand single-family home until the mid-20th century, when Beacon Hill got a bit tatty. I've heard that at one point the building was a rooming house. I'm trying to envision have many roomers may have roomed in my grand living room, which is quite large.

In the early 1980's, the building was converted to six condos, which were owned by a single man (who lived in the penthouse unit) and a family trust. The one man ran into some financial difficulties, and his units were repossessed by the Feds. We bought our unit at auction in 1991.

Did anyone famous ever live here? 

At one point, the trust fund daughter of a former governor lived above us, but that's about as famous as it gets in my recall.

The fictional Silas Lapham lived in Beacon Street in the 1800's, but I believe his fictional edifice burnt down. Which leaves this building out. Author William Dean Howells, who wrote The Rise of Silas Lapham, lived part of his non-fictional life on Beacon Street, but further out into Back Bay. 

Did anything interesting ever happen here? (Other than the grifters who "rented" an apartment in the building but never actually paid any rent. Instead, they spent all their time suing the management company and the owners of their unit, the condo association, and the owners of every other unit in the building, for some largely exaggerated unit and building defects. Fortunately for us, they agreed to arbitration, and the judge told them to take a hike. But not before causing us all sorts of aggravation (not to mention legal fees). I was especially aggrieved that they were suing me personally, given that - before we realized they were grifters - I had given them a baby present. Grrrrrr.)

Someday, maybe I'll get my Nancy Drew on and sleuth around to find the building's history to add to my 30+ years of lived experience. It may turn out to be one of the funner things to do when you live in an old building in a history-deep neighborhood. You never know what I might turn up. 

Building sleuths in England have long tried to do a reverse lookup, and figure out which workhouse was the model for the home-away of young Oliver Twist. Then, in 2010, historian and workhouse scholar Ruth Richardson cracked the code and discovered that it was the Strand Union Workhouse. 

Dr. Richardson’s discovery came just in time. The workhouse, still stunningly intact, was then an unused part of a hospital owned by a foundation connected to the National Health Service, which wanted it razed to make way for luxury apartments. It soon became clear that the structure on Cleveland Street, in a neighborhood called Fitzrovia, was that workhouse, especially when Dr. Richardson unearthed details about the place that were echoed in the novel. (Source: NY Times)

Among the deets Richardson found: the Strand expressly forbid second helpings, which was what poor hungry little Oliver Twist was after when he made the request for

another portion of gruel, a request that inspired a million memes: "Please, sir, I want some more." 

Anyway, because of Richardson's find, the Strand was granted historic preservation status. 

Which isn't so grand and glorious for Peter Burroughs. He's the director of development for the University College London Hospitals Charity. They're the outfit that owns the Strand, and the initial idea had been to tear it down and develop it. 

Now that is has preservation status, the Strand can't be torn down. So now the plan is to turn the property into 11 high-end apartments and two houses. 

Turning a workhouse into luxury living is quite something, for starters.

But wait, there's more.

The property includes land that in the 18th and 19th centuries served as a pauper’s graveyard. Last year, archaeologists started exhuming bodies, roughly 1,000 in all.

Exhuming all those bodies doesn't come cheap. The costs for the project has skyrocketed. It's now over $130M. (That covers the exhumations, plus the cost of a good sized apartment complex going up on the graveyard site, once they unearth and rebury those 1,000 souls, many who it's quite likely were denizens of the workhouse.)

This project looked like a good econonic bet back when it kicked off. But, alas:

... this is a lousy moment to be selling deluxe apartments in London. With the pandemic having accelerated the downturn in housing prices caused by Brexit, the only unknown is how much money the charity will ultimately lose.

When the workhouse units come on the market, later this year, the starting price for a one bedroom apartment will be $1.3M. 

That's a lot of gruel.  

I hope the University College London Hospitals Charity makes a lot of money to support their mission, but I'm probably not the only one who thinks it might have been more fitting to turn the workhouse into affordable housing.