practical joke

This is a street of elegant stucco terraced houses, two of which (numbers 23 and 24) straddled the mouth of the canyon. … they were knocked down and replaced with fake houses …. So began 150 years of practical jokes, with coal merchants sending young apprentices to deliver coal to the façades, or letters addressed to Mr N. O. Body, 24 Leinster Gardens. (There is no letterbox).