The first series aired in 2018, a second in 2019, a third in 2020, and a fourth in 2021, with each examining the history of a single residential building in an English city.

[1][2] The series consultant is design historian Professor Deborah Sugg Ryan, of the University of Portsmouth, who also appears in each episode.

[8][9][10][11][12] As a result of research conducted for the programme, a plaque was unveiled there, commemorating a former resident (1841–1857), the naturalist Joshua Alder, on 26 September 2018 by Olusoga and the Lord Mayor of Newcastle, David Down.

[19] Series 5, subtitled Two Cities at War, takes a different approach, comparing and contrasting the lives of the inhabitants of two apartment blocks—Block 2 of Montagu Mansions,[e] an Edwardian building in the Marylebone district of London and 72, Pfalzburger Strasse[f] in Wilmersdorf, Berlin—in the years leading up to and during World War II.

[20] Residents in London included the cinema impresario Cecil Bernstein and the poet and conscientious objector Timothy Corsellis, and in Berlin the chef and language teacher, Bonifatius Folli, from Togo, the historian and nazi, Paul Dittel, and Freda Fromm, whose brother Friedrich Fromm was a regular visitor.