Home Sweet Home

There's no place like home... for 100 years: Centenarian lives in the house where she was born (and these days it has running water and electricity)

When Georgina Brown was born in the front bedroom of her home, the Titanic had not even set sail.

One hundred years on and  Mrs Brown is still going  strong – and still living in the same cottage.

The great-grandmother is the fifth generation of her family to own the three-bedroom village property, which they have occupied since 1850.

Home sweet home: Georgina Brown has lived in the same house for 100 years

A photograph of Forge Cottage, Hambledon, Hampshire dated 1904. The pictured boys are Georgina Brown's cousins Ron (left) and Eric Andrews. The girls names are not known.

Today: Forge Cottage, Hambledon, Hampshire, the home of Georgina Brown, as it looks now

Still here: The 100-year-old sits in the kitchen of her cottage which has only been decorated three times since she was born

Despite the cottage in Hambledon, Hampshire, being valued at £650,000, Mrs Brown said: ‘I was born here and I will never leave.

‘I have so many happy memories here. It is a perfect little village and I know almost everyone here.’

She was born on January 13, 1912, a few miles from Southampton, where the Titanic left for its ill-fated maiden voyage that April.

She was delivered in the same upstairs room where her father George Lott was born and where she gave birth to daughters Sylvia and Pam, now 72 and 71, and where she still sleeps.

The cottage still has the same layout as when she was born, except for the addition of an inside toilet. Electricity and running water arrived in 1954.

Different world, different time: Photo taken in 1913 of Georgina Brown aged one-year with her mother Mary Lott next to the walnut tree in the back garden of Forge Cottage

1922: Georgina aged 10 with her dog Nell and parents George Harr and Mary Lott

Nell of a life: Miss Brown aged 15 with her dog Nell and aged 18 

Love amd marriage: A photograph dated 1937 featuring Georgina Brown and her first husband Jack Cleeve

All change: Forge Cottage as it looks today...

She can remember looking out  of her window and seeing  soldiers leaving the village on  their way to fight in the First World War, while some 30 years later  she saw Winston Churchill passing the house on his way to address troops at a nearby barracks  ahead of D-Day