The Georgian idea of treating a row of houses as if it were a palace front, giving the central houses columned fronts under a shared pediment, appeared first in London’s Grosvenor Square (1727 onwards; rebuilt) and in Bath’s Queen Square (1729 onwards).  Early terraces were also built by the two John Woods in Bath and under the direction of John Nash in Regent’s Park, London, and the name was picked up by speculative builders like Thomas Cubitt and soon became commonplace. It is far from being the case that terraced houses were only built for people of limited means, and this is especially true in London, where some of the wealthiest people in the country owned terraced houses in locations such as Belgrave Square and Carlton House Terrace.

During the Industrial Revolution Britain became the world’s first industrial power.  This had major social consequences. Britain’s towns and cities expanded dramatically as people flooded in looking for work.  The great influx of people created a demand for housing that far exceeded the existing supply, resulting in huge overcrowding.  However, the Victorians passed a series of social reforms to mitigate the effects.  Faced with the problem of housing the new industrial classes, terraced housing developed as a solution to the overcrowding.  Terraced housing consists of long rows of small houses of repeating design.  Each house shares a wall with the two neighbouring houses – this was economical because it saved materials. 

Terraces were built in industrial areas near to factories, pits, shipyards and so on.  This meant that workers did not have to walk far to work.  In fact, many industrialists built terraces to house their workers.  For example, Lord Armstrong built the township of Elswick in Newcastle Upon Tyne.  Armstrong’s Elswick works employed 20,000 people.  It may seem very generous and benevolent to provide housing for your workers, but Armstrong did it for his own reasons.  It created a stable community on his doorstep, and thereby ensured a secure workforce.  Victorian philanthropy was often self-serving.

Each part of the country developed its own form of terraced housing.  For example, Leeds and West Yorkshire have back-to-back housing, in which houses share a rear wall.  Birmingham also has examples of back-to-back housing.  The houses were literally built ‘back to back’ one room deep.  The typical back-to-back house has three rooms, one above the other.  Because three of the four walls were shared, they were difficult to ventilate.  This housing type became notorious for squalor, disease and poverty due to its cramped design and poor sanitation. 

Even in the Vixtorian era back-to-back was preceived as being an unhealthy housing form.  Areas of Bradford and its back-to-back housing were cleared in the late 19th century, a process which was resumed after World War I. So strong was the opposition to back-to-backs in Bradford that in 1860 the Council forbade the building of them. Manchester outlawed them in 1844.  Leeds, however, continued to build them until the 1930s. The ban in Bradford proved to be short-lived. So fierce was the counter-attack from interested parties that the ban became an election issue and the chairman of the Building Committee lost his seat as a result. The building of back-to-backs recommenced after 1865.

The post-1865 houses were subject to new byelaws which demanded that a passage be built between houses which was 6ft. 6in. wide and 8ft. high; each house was to have its own privy in the rear yard; streets were to be open-ended and no longer built in closed courts.  The minimum street width was to be 42 feet. The byelaws changed the appearance of the back-to-back. The dominant feature of its elevation became the entrance to the passage. These houses became known as ‘tunnel backs’, the tunnel providing better ventilation of the rear, and easier access for refuse removal.

Back-to-back houses were a phenomenon largely of the north and midlands. They provided a high density of occupation, and thus an increased number of rentals, together with some small economy of materials - the chief reason for building them. But even in its day the form was not popular with health authorities, some of which prohibited them. Eventually the 1909 Housing Act did away with them altogether, and most councils complied with this legislation.

The main reason back-to-backs were condemned was that they lacked through-ventilation.  This was considered important because medical opinion held that disease was spread by inhaling bad air. The theory of miasma, as it was known, was firmly believed in the first half of the 19th century, and it was not until Pasteur’s work on germs had been published in 1878 that the notion was dispelled. If back-to-backs lacked light and air, had poor drainage and bad sanitation, or were built in squalid courts, then these were problems they shared with other working-class houses. The spread of disease was not a fault of the architectural form, but of imperfect knowledge.

Manchester had two-up-two-down housing.  On Tyneside there was a distinctive type known as the Tyneside flat.  This consists of two flats, one on top of the other.  From the outside they look almost like normal terraces, but you can recognise them because they have two doors side by side.  One leads to the ground floor flat and the other leads upstairs.  This was a very economical form because it meant that two families could live under one roof.

In the North East of England, Sunderland evolved a distinctive form of low-cost housing: single-storey terraced homes that came to be known as Sunderland cottages.  Virtually unique in England, the form may be understood as a ‘terraced bungalow.’  Examples can be found in Newbottle, Hetton-le-Hole and Seaham, and as far away as Darlington and Bedlington.  Yet the form is readily associated with Sunderland, contrasting dramatically with housing forms that emerged in other towns and cities during the nineteenth-century. 

Conclusion

By the early Victorian period, a terrace had come to designate any style of housing where individual houses repeating one design are joined together into rows. The style was used for workers’ housing in industrial districts during the great industrial boom following the industrial revolution, particularly in the houses built for workers of the expanding textile industry. The terrace style spread widely in the UK, and was the usual form of high density residential housing up to World War II, though the 19th century need for expressive individuality inspired variation of facade details and floor-plans reversed with those of each neighboring pair, to offer variety within the standardized format. Post-World War II, housing redevelopment has led to many outdated or dilapidated terraces being cleared to make room for tower blocks, which occupy a much lower area of land. Because of this land use in the inner cityareas could in theory have been used to create greater accessibility, employment or recreational or leisure centres. However botched implementation meant that in many areas (like Manchester or the London estates) the towerblocks offering no real improvement for rehoused residents over their prior terraced houses.

In 2005 the English Heritage report Low Demand Housing and the Historic Environment found that repairing a standard Victorian terraced house over thirty years is around sixty-percent cheaper than building and maintaining a newly-built house.