Today in Boston on Milk Street where Benjamin Franklin was born you see the high rises
of the modern economy. The house in Philadelphia was torn down and we only have the kind of shadow
of what it might have been from the architectural footings. And in Passy in Paris where he spent
those eight years nothing much remains. His only surviving house is not any one of those
other places. Not Boston, not Philadelphia, not Paris, but in the center of London.
The London that he found was the most extraordinary city on earth at the time.
This is the age of the coffee house and the chocolate house and the pamphlets
and the newspapers. The printing presses are running 24 hours a day.
Dr. Johnson said of London in this era: "The man who is tired of London is tired of life, because
London offers everything that life can afford." London was the heart of the British Empire. It was
the place that North Americans look to. Franklin is there as the agent first of Pennsylvania
and really the Pennsylvania assembly but he ends up kind of representing North Americans in
general. I mean he almost serves as a kind of informal ambassador. Benjamin Franklin House,
36 Craven Street as it came to be numbered, served as the first de facto American embassy.
Anyone who was anyone calling in from the colonies would pay their respects to Dr Franklin.
He had left behind his wife Deborah in Philadelphia and his daughter Sally.
And he very much found a kind of surrogate family in his landlady, Margaret Stevenson
and in her daughter Paulie. Paulie became a kind of daughter to him. Franklin was writing
lots of letters about science to Paulie. She was a bright young woman very curious and they had a
kind of meeting of the minds. The same passion for knowledge the same curiosity. When he dies,
the story is, that at his bedside in 1790 alongside his own daughter is his would-be
adopted daughter Paulie and all of her descendants become American because of Benjamin Franklin.
He was with his son William at the beginning of his time here on Craven Street. And he brings with
him two black servants. They were slaves. This is a very typical Georgian, workaday house, but it
still had below stairs. So for a small terrace house there were a lot of people to fit in.
Franklin rents officially four rooms but he makes his mark in every one of them. When you come into
the first room through this narrow hallway you get to what we call Margaret Stevenson's sitting room.
Here, that would have been about social life in London. Maybe you would hear the strains of the
glass armonica, the instrument that Benjamin Franklin created here at Craven Street. Then
there's the nicest room of the house, what we call Franklin's parlor. And here he would have been
doing his writing, he would have been receiving his guests. And in the room adjoining to that
is what we call Franklin's laboratory. It's been a huge labor of love to see the house
come back to life. During the second World War an incendiary bomb fell on the roof but didn't
explode. So we are very lucky, that where so much of London was destroyed, that Benjamin Franklin
House survived. The house was derelict from about the mid-1970s until we began conservation work in
the early 2000s in the building. Our approach has been about conservation rather than restoration.
Restoration implies that you bring the building back to the day that it was built. Here it's about
how the house has evolved over time. We like to say that Benjamin Franklin planted the seeds of
the so-called "Special Relationship" between Britain and America. There was this time when
we were both connected and this house is a kind of bridge to the past and also to the future.