The streets nestled around London’s Spitalfields are some of the most highly sought-after in the capital. Once the famed hunting ground of Jack the Ripper, names such as Hanbury Street and Dorset Street live on in London’s darker history. On Folgate Street, one house remains as a living portrait of the past. Dennis Severs’ house, at number 18, was ranked by David Hockney among the world’s five greatest opera experiences. The term “opera” is perhaps misleading but the house is a breed of performance art.

For over 30 years, the house was Severs’ life work as he painstakingly converted it into a home for an imaginary family of nineteenth-century Huguenot silk weavers. Living in the house throughout this process, Severs created a twin mausoleum that engages the spectator in a strange and  playful dialogue.

Walking through Spitalfields now, fighting through the flocks of Brick Lane bound art students, it is hard to imagine the East End of the late sixties, let alone the London Severs recreated in his house. Severs arrived in London as the Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust was just beginning its fight for Tower Hamlets’ historical buildings. At the same time, a growing number of artists and intellectuals were setting up house in the area (Gilbert and George lived on nearby Fournier Street). At this conflux of art and history, Severs bought a dilapidated terraced house on Folgate Street and began to turn it into his own unique form of narrative art.

Today, visitors to the house are greeted by a strongly-worded advertisement warning against expectations of historical accuracy and passive observation: this is not a house for “visiting tourists or bored company directors’ wives”. Severs claimed that the house demands the “same style of concentration as does an Old Masters exhibition” and indeed much of the house resembles the dimly lit domestic scenes of familiar oil paintings. Walking up from the basement to the attic rooms, the years and furnishings advance, floor-by-floor, from 1724 through to 1914.

The first room is a coal store, dank and lit only by a smudge of natural light seeping in through a soot-caked window. Severs’ kitchen is warmer, thawed by a heavy stove and littered with traces of family life: breakfast is still on the table and a hand-decorated gingerbread man sits on a shelf. The house plays a game of hide-and-seek leading the visitor on with vestiges of imagined life. At the top of the house though, Severs tells a different story. The artist shunned the eiderdowns and upholstery of the wealthier Victorian room below to live out his own fantasy of Dickensian squalor in the attic. Until his death in 1999, Severs slept in this room, replete with cobwebs, peeling wallpaper and a chamber pot.

On the other side of London, just off Kensington High Street, 18 Stafford Terrace was home to another artist, Edward Linley Sambourne, the Punch cartoonist and self-styled bohemian, who lived at number 18 from 1874 until his death in 1910. The house is almost entirely unchanged; a tribute to late Victorian style. The house was sold in 1980 on the condition that it would be run as a museum. But, like Dennis Severs’ house, it is so much more than that. If the Spitalfields house is “still-life drama”, 18 Stafford Terrace is nigh-on theatre.

It is not the furnishings themselves that make the house intriguing but the family they evoke. The curiosities perched in glass cases – a butterfly, a lizard’s foot – speak of a travelled couple with an eye for detail. In the drawing room the housekeeper directs your attention to a patch of wall without paper. Mr Sambourne had moved a picture, forgetful that the expensive print only ran to the edges of the picture frames to save costs. Such personal oddities, combined with accounts from Mrs Sambourne’s diaries offer a unique through-the-keyhole look at Victorian life. So much so, that at times your presence feels like an intrusion, a rude interruption into a private house during an age of privacy. Walking into Edward Sambourne’s bathroom, you feel, was something not even his wife did. The walls are collaged with hundreds of cyanotype photographs, taken by Sambourne himself, of models for his cartoons. It begs the question: what was he drawing for Punch that required so many photos of naked women?

London is opening its doors this year. Roger Hiorn’s council flat turned crystal installation is set to win the Turner Prize having been spared repeated threats of demolition and long-standing houses-cum-museums such as The Sir John Soane may soon be joined by Khadambi Asalache’s house in Wandsworth. The Kenyan poet’s house promises exquisitely carved and patterned interiors and a unique slice of London’s cultural history. But the National Trust’s own financial uncertainty means that the house may never receive the visitors it deserves. Fragile and in need of repair, the Khadambi Asalache house will require a further £2 million if it is to be saved.

At a time when the price of upkeep has become prohibitive, the very institution in place to protect England’s houses is feeling its own pressures. What better time, then, to escape for a few hours into another England, into the forgotten London of numbers 18 Folgate Street and Stafford Terrace.