Now, after a £2.5m restoration funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund and private donations, the house has regained its 18th-century lustre and will open to the public for the first time this week.
The narrow Georgian terrace near Charing Cross was Franklin’s home for nearly 16 years and became, in effect, the first American embassy, where he entertained leading figures of the day, including Joseph Priestley, Josiah Wedgwood and Thomas Paine, and demonstrated the properties of electricity to alarmed dinner guests. He lived in the best rooms on the first floor. Had you been passing along the cobbled street and looked up, you might have seen Franklin sitting stark naked, “air bathing” by the windows, a practice he believed good for his health.
If his story was one of rags to riches — the self- educated son of a Boston soapmaker, he made his fortune publishing almanacs and rose to become one of America’s great political leaders — his homes have not been so fortunate. A five-storey terrace, 36 Craven Street, is the only Franklin residence still standing on either side of the Atlantic. It has survived floods, fire, shoddy Victorian renovations, rot, bombs (two houses opposite were destroyed in the second world war) and neglect.
The Friends of Benjamin Franklin House, a charity, bought the Grade I-listed house from British Rail in 1990. Its first priority was to save the house from collapse (which cost £800,000), then to restore it, and then to open it as a museum and study centre. The roof was in such a bad state that it had to be rebuilt and reslated, and the spine wall leading from the sitting room to Franklin’s laboratory was reinstated, as its removal had caused the building to sag.
Though battered, most of the property’s original features, including wooden panels, fireplaces, shutters and the main staircase (which Franklin used for exercise, carrying weights) were still in situ.
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“We were lucky,” says Patrick Dillon, the project’s interior architect. “But it was a difficult job. In many cases, we’ve left the damage in the panelling. It really helps to feel the ghosts when you’re in the house.” The ceilings were renewed with lime plaster using 18th-century methods, but the hardest job was routing optic fibres and wires around the house to provide the museum’s audiovisual experience.
New techniques for chemical analysis, carried out by Patrick Baty of the Paint & Paper Library, found exactly what colour the walls and woodwork had been when Franklin lived in the house: a muted, mossy green and a shiny, murky brown. Baty also discovered a thin layer of glaze in the first-floor parlour, which he believes Franklin used on its panels to gain more reflective light.
Uncovering the fireplaces caused the most excitement. Franklin had written many letters complaining about the inefficient stove in his room, suggesting a smaller opening to enable the fire to draw better. During renovations, workmen uncovered a metal grille adapted to the precise dimensions of his design.
There will be no red ropes to cordon off visitors to Craven Street. The house itself, which is as close as possible to how it was when Franklin lived there, is the backbone of the museum. Visitors will be able to tour the rooms where Franklin wrote his autobiography and invented the glass harmonica and get a sense of the home in which up to 10 people, including Franklin’s illegitimate son, lived for more than a decade.
The restoration also revealed a grisly side to the house’s history. Restoration work had to be suspended when a human thigh bone was unearthed in the basement. Further excavation recovered more than 1,200 pieces of bone, including trepanned skulls. Too ancient to worry Scotland Yard, the remains probably came from an anatomy school run by William Hewson, the son-in-law of Franklin’s landlord, on the premises. The ever inquisitive American, however, no doubt attended at least one of the dissections that took place.
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Benjamin Franklin House, 020 7930 9121, www.benjaminfranklinhouse.org