The wallpaper came away in one sheet, exposing a map drawn directly onto the plaster in blue carpenter's pencil. It covered an area roughly two metres wide and a metre and a half high, and it had been executed with a straightedge.
The property is a first-floor flat above a former ironmonger's on a street that has been continuously occupied since the 1840s. The current owners were removing four layers of paper when the drawing appeared beneath the innermost.
The innermost layer has been dated by adhesive analysis to between 1928 and 1936. The drawing is therefore older than that, though how much older cannot be established from the plaster alone.
A route absent from every map
Three landmarks on the map still exist. A church, a bridge abutment, and the corner of a public building are all rendered accurately and in correct relation to one another. Their inclusion is what persuaded the city archive to examine the drawing rather than dismiss it.
The route between them crossed courtyards and sealed basements as if the city had once possessed a second, private street plan. It does not correspond to any thoroughfare on any surviving municipal map from any period.
The route crossed courtyards and sealed basements as if the city had possessed a second street plan.
An archivist at the city records office, Helena Marsh, identified nine points along the route that correspond to properties recorded in the 1890s as being in single ownership. The owner in each case was a company that dissolved in 1904 and whose records have not survived.
Marsh is careful about what this establishes. Common ownership of nine properties along a line is not evidence of a passage between them. It is, she notes, exactly what one would expect to find if such a passage had existed, and also what one would expect if a single landlord had simply bought up a street.
What remains behind the walls
Two of the nine basements have been surveyed. One contains a bricked opening in a party wall, of a size consistent with a doorway, closed with brick that does not match the surrounding fabric. The other has been fully rebuilt and retains nothing of its original structure.
The remaining seven are in commercial use and access has not been granted. Two owners have declined outright. The others have not responded to written requests over a period of eight months.
The drawing includes twelve annotations in a shorthand that has not been identified. A paleographer consulted by the archive suggested they are numerals in a private notation rather than words, on the basis of their repetition and position, but declined to offer a reading.
Marsh's own view, offered with heavy qualification, is that the map records a route used rather than a route proposed. She bases this on the corrections: three lines have been rubbed out and redrawn slightly differently, which she regards as more consistent with a record being amended than with a plan being designed.
The owners have not resumed work on that wall. They have papered the remaining three walls and have left the fourth as it is, behind its panel, which the husband describes as the only decision the two of them reached without argument during the entire renovation.
