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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 09 February 2009
Title deeds are an invaluable source of information on the evolution of local housing markets. They are also a key to three other data sources. First, they complement plans registered with a local authority before a house was built. Second, by recording the deaths of most rentier landlords they give an entry point into the Probate Registry. Third, they check property ownership as listed in rate books. Finally, they are complementary in a more general sense. They are reliable (because solicitors take special care to see that the facts are correct) and each event in the history of a house is made intelligible by being recorded as part of a time sequence. But information is limited to one house or at most a block. Only by painstaking accumulation of a large number of deeds is it possible to discern economic patterns. Even then a sample of deeds drawn from a whole city might be insensitive to the finely balanced economic equations of, for example, landlords' rental income and their offsetting payments to mortgagees, agents, and ground landlords. Confined to a more manageable suburb, a sample of deeds may be atypical of the city. On the other hand, complementary data from the other registers is comprehensive, covering big geographic areas and large numbers of houses or people. But it comes as snapshots, aggregated appearances which are difficult to make socially or economically intelligible: the atomised names of otherwise anonymous builders on a building plan, landlords in a rate book, and property owners in the Probate Registry.
Based on evidence from the research programme sponsored by the S.S.R.C. at the Centre for Urban & Regional Studies, Birmingham University.
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