Mr Straw's House

Mr Straw's House is one of the National Trust's most unusual properties: an unremarkable Edwardian semi-detached house in an unremarkable Worksop street that happens to have been left entirely untouched since the late 1920s. The Straw family — a grocer and his two bachelor sons — lived here for decades without changing a thing after the patriarch died, and the result is an eerily intact domestic time capsule.

The house is modest in scale but extraordinarily detailed. Original wallpapers, furniture, family photographs, and even the groceries in the kitchen larder have been preserved. It is not a grand house — that is precisely the point. Visits are by guided tour only and numbers are strictly limited; book ahead through the National Trust website, especially in summer.

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A story
When William Straw senior died in 1932, his sons William junior and Walter simply stopped updating the house. No new furniture, no repainting, no rearranging. By the time the National Trust acquired it in 1990, the rooms were a perfect record of a middle-class Nottinghamshire household from the late 1920s — calendars still showing the year of the elder Straw's death, hats hanging where they had been left fifty years before.

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