Sources

Everything Hearth draws on, what it covers, and how far we trust it. The reliability figure is what we multiply an address match by to get the confidence shown on each event.

• HM Land Registry Price Paid Data

  reliability 98%

  Every registered sale in England & Wales since 1995

  Queried liveOpen Government Licence v3.0

  The best source we have: a statutory register of real transactions with structured addresses. It records sales, not ownership: a house held in one family for forty years leaves no trace here.

• National Heritage List for England

  reliability 97%

  Listed buildings, scheduled monuments, registered parks, battlefields

  Queried liveOpen Government Licence v3.0

  Reached via planning.data.gov.uk. Listings are recorded as points rather than outlines, so we match against a tight box around your address and mark the result as possibly a neighbour.

• planning.data.gov.uk

  reliability 92%

  Conservation areas, article 4 directions, tree preservation orders

  Queried liveOpen Government Licence v3.0

  Area designations are tested for whether they actually contain your house, so these are the most reliable events on the page. The platform's planning-application dataset covers one authority and carries no addresses, so we don't rely on it.

• postcodes.io

  reliability 95%

  Postcode to location and administrative area

  Queried liveOpen Government Licence v3.0

  ONS data. Also gives the date a postcode was introduced, which is a genuine build-date clue for anything built after about 1980.

• Energy Performance of Buildings Register

  reliability 72%

  Energy assessments since 2008, with floor area and construction age band

  Needs an API keyOpen Government Licence v3.0

  Scored lower than the registers because assessors work quickly and the age band in particular is often estimated by eye. Its real value is comparative: a floor area that grows between two assessments means somebody extended the house.

• National Library of Scotland historic maps

  reliability 90%

  Ordnance Survey mapping from the 1840s onwards

  Queried liveCC BY 4.0

  Georeferenced and free. The quickest way to establish whether a building stood on your plot before the registers began.

• GOV.UK Find a will

  reliability 95%

  Probate calendars, 1858 to the present

  No API: we build the searchPublic record

  No API. Free to search. Pre-1966 entries are scans of the original calendar and give an address at death, an occupation and an estate value.

• Census, 1939 Register, electoral registers

  reliability 85%

  1841 to 1921, plus 1939

  No API: we build the searchPublic record, commercially digitised

  Held behind subscription by Findmypast and Ancestry. We build the address search; they hold the images. The 1921 census is the most recent available: the hundred-year closure rule governs release, and the 1931 returns were destroyed by fire in 1942.

• British Newspaper Archive

  reliability 60%

  Local and national press, roughly 1700–1950

  No API: we build the searchCommercially digitised

  Scored lowest of the archives, because OCR on nineteenth-century newsprint is unreliable and a street-name match is not a house match. Still the single richest source of story, as opposed to record.

• Companies House

  reliability 90%

  Companies registered at an address, 1980s onwards

  No API: we build the searchOpen Government Licence v3.0

  Free to search by postcode. Reveals businesses quietly run from a house.