A Different Way of Moving House

At SER much of our work comes from a house move, usually when the purchaser needs a structural survey of the property they are looking to buy. My interest was piqued therefore, by an article on the BBC News the other day which combined both moving house and a breath-taking feat of engineering.
A 139-year-old house in San Francisco has been lifted off its foundations, put on wheels and moved 6 blocks away. It will be replaced by a new 48-unit building. Whilst new housing is needed in the city, the ornate Victorian home is a big part of San Francisco’s heritage and great effort is being made to preserve it. The SER Blog has covered such a topic before, when the 20th Anniversary of moving the Belle Tout Lighthouse in Sussex came around in March 2019 and we ourselves have been involved in an operation to move a local Signal Box to ensure its preservation for generations to come.
So this concept, although unusual, does happen. On closer investigation, however, I discovered that although it hasn’t happened for over 50 years, it is perhaps not so unusual after all. San Francisco has a history of similar house relocations and, in an article in The Guardian, similar moves as far back as 1886 are described, when horses were used to pull the buildings over oiled planks. Sometimes homes were even brought in by ship and then moved across the city. The article’s author goes on to describe how, in the 1950s neighbourhoods which were home to mainly black and immigrant communities were demolished to make way for new housing. In what is now considered a shocking act of gentrification, many hundreds of businesses were closed and thousands of households were uprooted. After a public outcry however, 12 of the ‘Victorians’ as they are so called, were saved and relocated.
Apparently the slow and painstaking process hasn’t changed much in 50 years and many came out to witness the spectacle of this oversized load making its snail’s pace way down the street.