A terrace is a continuous row of houses sharing side walls. They were built in vast numbers between the 1840s and the First World War to house the workers of the industrial cities, and they remain the defining image of urban Britain.
Two up, two down
The classic working-class terrace had four rooms: a front parlour and a back kitchen or scullery downstairs, and two bedrooms above. The lavatory was outside, in the back yard, shared in the worst cases between several households. Bathrooms were rare; washing was done in a tin bath in front of the fire.
Grander terraces existed too — the Georgian terraces of Bath, Edinburgh’s New Town and Bloomsbury are the same building form at a completely different scale, with three or four storeys, servants’ quarters and a basement.
Back-to-backs
The worst version, and worth understanding because it explains a great deal about Victorian public health. A back-to-back shared its rear wall with another house as well as its sides, so it had windows and a door on one side only, no through ventilation, and no yard.
They were built in enormous numbers in Leeds, Birmingham, Bradford and Manchester, and they were lethal — cholera and typhus spread through them freely. New building was prohibited from 1909, and clearance continued for decades; the last inhabited back-to-backs survived into the 1970s.
A preserved court of them is open to visitors in Birmingham, run by the National Trust, and it is one of the more sobering house museums in Britain.
The features
- A front door onto the street, sometimes directly with no front garden at all.
- A back yard with a gate onto a rear alley — the ginnel, snicket, jitty or entry depending on which part of the country you are in.
- A bay window in the later and better ones.
- A coal hole or cellar grate in the pavement, for deliveries.
- A shared chimney stack and a party wall thin enough to hear the neighbours through.
From slum to desirable
The reversal is striking. Terraces were condemned as slums through the mid-twentieth century, and hundreds of thousands were demolished in slum clearance programmes between the 1950s and 1970s, their residents moved into tower blocks and new estates.
A great deal of that clearance is now regarded as a mistake — solid houses in walkable streets replaced by system-built blocks that failed within a generation. The terraces that survived have been extended, insulated and modernised, and in cities like London, Bristol and Manchester they now sell for sums that would astonish the people who built them.
Coronation Street
The terraced street is so central to British self-image that the country’s longest-running television programme is named after one. Corrie’s cobbled street, corner shop and pub is a deliberately preserved version of the industrial northern terrace, and it has run since 1960 partly because that setting still means something to people.