120 not out: family's years in same house

But now the Evening Standard has discovered a family who have been in the same property for more than a century.

The Sedgwicks have inhabited the same three-bedroom Victorian semi in Vallance Road, Bethnal Green, for 120 years. Five generations of the family have lived there.

The current resident is sound designer Jack Sedgwick, 24, who shares the property with his girlfriend and two cousins.

The house is owned by his mother Irene and her three sisters. It was originally rented by Mrs Sedgwick's greatgrandparents, the Ferguzzas, when they emigrated from Lombardy in northern Italy in the 1880s.

Mrs Sedgwick, 57, a retired dancer, said today: "I don't know much about my great-grandparents - I don't even know their first names.

"They came to London as part of a wave of Italian migrants who were trying to make their fortune. They took the house on and it's been in the family ever since."

When the Ferguzzas died, one of their three daughters, Louisa Daltrey, a seamstress, stayed on with her husband Joseph, a bookkeeper at East India Docks.

During the Second World War heavy bombing turned much of the East End into rubble but the house was left unscathed. The Daltreys continued to live there after the war with daughter Doris, a court dressmaker, her husband, cabinet maker William Crowll, and their three daughters, who included Irene Sedgwick.

She said: "Me and my two sisters shared one bedroom, my grandparents had another and my parents were in the third bedroom downstairs. We were never hard up - it was how people used to live at that time. By today's standards it was crowded, but we thought it was perfectly normal."

Mr Crowll bought the house in the Sixties for £500 - and a hand-made bedroom suite. Mrs Sedgwick said: "The landlord wanted to sell it for £2,000 but my father did a deal. He managed to knock the price down by quite a bit by throwing in some furniture.

"When we were little we used to wash in a tin bath in the kitchen, but when we reached our early teens our dad built a makeshift bathroom in the back yard. It had its own gas-heated boiler, but I remember it being a bit chilly.

"We had a proper indoor bathroom installed in 1965. It wasn't great but it was luxurious compared with what we'd had before." When her mother died in 1995 she left the house to her daughters.

Jack Sedgwick said: "I used to visit the house all the time when I was a child and I've now lived here for about seven years. It feels like a home, it's the hub of our family. Everyone has a set of keys and it's where we celebrate Christmas and birthdays."

Mrs Sedgwick added: "It's a fantastic house. When you have been born and brought up in such a place, it makes you very aware of your history. We've no plans to sell it and I hope it will be there for future generations."

Has your family lived at the same property longer than the Sedgwicks? Email news@standard.co.uk