Archived report · 4 min read · Set in The Old Quarter ·
The Register of Old Addresses
The superseded-address register of the Old Quarter is still being added to in dated entries years after it was closed, each new page stamped current by a press nobody can put a hand on.
- filed: "with the annual register"
- reference: "OQ/AR/33"
1. This note is filed with the annual register of the district, under OQ/AR/33, and concerns the superseded-address register of the Old Quarter, kept under the Housing Acts for the purpose of recording every dwelling address that has ceased to exist by demolition, renumbering, or the closing of a court or entry. The register is bound, foolscap of good rag paper, sixty leaves to a gathering, and it was formally closed by the last renumbering scheme in 1961.
2. A closed register, in the practice of this office, is a register that receives no further entries. The old addresses of the Old Quarter ran to some four hundred entries by 1961, every one entered and signed in the columns: former name, former number, the survey it was stood down on, the address its rating was transferred to, and the clerk's initials. The last entry of the proper series is the closing of Stanyard's Entry, on the 14th of November, 1961. That should be the end of the book, and on paper it is.
3. The book continues. Entries have been appearing in it ever since, in the correct columns, in a fair round clerk's hand, dated, initialled, and ruled off at the foot of each in the manner the office taught and retired. The entries are dated the way entries are dated, month and year, and they have run forward through every year since the closing, at a rate of six to eleven a year. The register for the year just past carries nine.
4. The entries are all of addresses that were never entered before. They are not the renumbered houses, not the demolition clearances, none of the four hundred known closures. They are addresses that appear in no rate book, no directory, no survey of any year held by this office or the city library: Mowbray's Yard, the second tenement, entered with a standing-down date of 1959 and a transferred rating to an address in the New Town that does not answer the rating file; a butcher's shop with a flat over it whose street name is legible but attaches to no street; a first-floor room over a chandler's, entered as closed on a survey dated in a month with no thirty-first day.
5. The stamping is the part this note cannot carry past description. Every new entry bears, across the columns, the office's CURRENT stamp, the rubber press with the date wheel that the office uses on live schedules. The stamp is in good ordinary ink of the right violet and it is struck cleanly, square to the page, on the day the entry was made by the look of it. The press itself is held in the registrars' room. It has been accounted for on every stocktaking since 1961. Its last use is logged and its wheel is set to the logged date. The heelprints on the register do not agree with the press's type, being a shade sharper, the letters standing prouder of the paper than a rubber of that age could print.
6. Checks were made. The clerks past and present, asked against their initials, disown the hand. The fair round lettering resembles the hand of a registrar who served 1946 to 1953 and died before the register was closed, but the dating runs past his death by nineteen years and counting. The paper of the added pages has been matched against the gathering and is of the same rag stock, cut to the same trim, though the book was reported full at the closing ceremony and the extra pages were never bound in by any bookbinder this office employed.
7. The practice of this office, reviewed each year, has settled at last into leaving the book on its shelf and filing to it as to a live record, because the addresses the entries name keep turning up in the ordinary papers: on a death certificate here, a pension draft there, an insurance policy returned marked gone away. The rating transfers given in the entries, checked against the rating files, have a way of being right.
8. The register will be produced with the annual papers as a live record again this year, nine entries, stamped current, and the question the office leaves standing at the foot of OQ/AR/33 is the one it cannot rule: the register is being kept up to date by somebody who was trained in this office and is not on its staff — and what quarter of the city his entries are closing down on, if not this one.