Wallpaper: Poems & Houses with Laura Scott

Here’s Laura Scott on her upcoming course, Poems & Houses; House & home; poetics of our storied buildings.  

My house and the ghost of a doorway

In my house there’s the ghost of a doorway. I can’t remember when I first noticed it, but I do remember the gentle shock of running my hand over it – hang on, how can that be there?  It’s one of the badly hidden secrets of the house, like the keys we found when we moved in, with their Alice-in-Wonderland labels to rooms that didn’t exist, or like the inexplicably large fireplace in the smallest room. But anyway, back to the ghost door. The recessed shape of a door is still very much there, but there’s no handle, no way of opening it. Its surface is smooth and covered in the pineapple wallpaper which a previous owner hung on all the landings.

Sometimes I imagine what it would be like to open it, to walk freely into the rooms waiting on the other side, how it would feel to stride around the full house, the true house, rather than be confined to one of its limbs. But I don’t really want to do that. I’d miss the ghost door with all its promise and possibility.

And this is one of the things I love, not just about this house, but about all houses – the way they carry traces of their pasts in their shy membranes, their landings and stairs, doorways and windows.

It hints at another life for the house, another way of using it, a time when it was arranged in a different way. And this is one of the things I love, not just about this house, but about all houses – the way they carry traces of their pasts in their shy membranes, their landings and stairs, doorways and windows. Houses carry an ingrained eloquence in their very structures and if we listen, carefully, sometimes we can tune in to this eloquence and hear what it says. 

Push on a house’s invisible door to find the story behind

If we can get into the right place we can hold our ears up to the walls, bring our eyes down to the skirting boards, curl our fingers around the bannisters, feel the floorboards warp under our feet, and then we can push at those wallpapered doors and find some of the rooms waiting on the other side.   

That’s what I want to do in the extraordinary space of Somerset House – to explore different ways of tuning in to houses. And what could be better than that?

Laura Scott is teaching our in-person course, Poems & Houses a 1 full-day session, running 10.30am – 4.30pm (BST), on 25 May 2024. This course will take place at Somerset House, Strand, London, WC2R 1LA.