When moving premises in 2015, the owners of Maproom researched the history of the building that was going to be our new base – a well-preserved 140-year-old four-storey Victorian townhouse on the Hook Road in Surbiton. We had noted that the old house is called Hardy's Villa on the Land Registry, but we did not at first perceive any significance to the name. However, the Wikipedia entry for Surbiton mentioned that Hook Road is associated with the celebrated 19th-century novelist Thomas Hardy, and we started wondering about a connection. Cue lots of research in books and documents about the history of Kingston upon Thames. We also spent time scrutinising maps from the Victorian era, overlaying them with modern digital maps. To our surprise and delight, we discovered that Thomas Hardy was indeed living in our vicinity in the mid-1870s. Age 33 and newly married to his wife, Emma; the couple were starting their married life in lodgings called St David's Villa, ... Read more