Terraced house
|
A street of British Victorian/Edwardian terraced homes. |
In
architecture and
city planning, a
terrace,
rowhouse, or
townhouse (though the latter term can also refer to
patio houses) is a style of
housing in use since the late
17th century, where a row of identical or mirror-image houses share side walls. The first and last of these houses is called an
end terrace.
The term
terrace was borrowed from
garden terraces by English architects of the late
Georgian period to describe streets of houses whose uniform fronts and uniform height created an ensemble that was more stylish than a "row". The "row", as in the
16th century "Yarmouth Rows" in
Great Yarmouth,
Norfolk, was a designation for a narrow street where the building fronts uniformly ran right to the property line.
In
England, the first streets of houses with uniform fronts were built by the
Huguenot entrepreneur
Nicholas Barbon in the rebuilding after the
Great Fire of London, but
Paris had led the way in the
Place des Vosges (
1605 –
1612). In Parisian squares, central blocks were given discreet prominence, to relieve the façade, but 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) (Summerson
1947).
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 richest people in the country owned terraced houses in locations such as
Belgrave Square and
Carlton House Terrace.
By the early
Victorian period, a
terrace had come to designate any style of
housing where individual houses repeating one design are conjoined into rows either long or short. 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.
In the UK terraced
industrial district housing has enjoyed huge price rises since around
2001, with prices in most areas (outside London) having more than tripled by mid-2005. In affluent areas terraced houses are often called 'townhouses'. In the 1960s and 1970s areas of affordable terraced housing were often quickly colonised by artists, gay men and young professionals, this being the early stages of the
gentrification that happened in parts of many British cities.
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. In a 2003 survey for
Heritage Counts a team of experts contrasted a Victorian terrace with a house built after 1980, and found that:
"The research demonstrated that, contrary to earlier thinking, older housing actually costs less to maintain and occupy over the long-term life of the dwelling than more modern housing. Largely due to the quality and life-span of the materials used, the Victorian terrace house proved almost £1,000 per 100m
2 cheaper to maintain and inhabit on average each year."
Terraced housing was introduced to
Australia from the United Kingdom in the nineteeth century. Large numbers of terraced houses were built in the inner suburbs of large Austalian cities, particularly
Sydney and
Melbourne, mainly between the 1850s and the 1890s. The beginning of this period coincided with a population boom caused by the
Victorian and
New South Wales Gold Rushes of the 1850s and finished with an
economic depression in the early 1890s.
Detached housing became the popular style of housing in Australia following
Federation in 1900.
Terraced housing in Australia ranged from expensive middle-class houses of three, four and five-storeys down to cheaply built single-storey houses in working-class suburbs. The most common building material used was
brick, often covered with
stucco, but the cheapest houses, particularly the single-storey ones in
Melbourne, were often built of
weatherboards.
In the first half of the twentieth-century, terraced housing in Australia fell into disfavour and the inner-city areas where they were found were often considered
slums. In recent decades these inner-city areas and their terraced houses have been
gentrified.
In
New York City, a large apartment building occupying a full city block,
London Terrace, finished in
1930/
1931 capitalized on the earlier, more stylish connotation. Terrace housing in American usage generally continued to be called
townhouses in the
United States, with a distinctive type found in New York City, among other cities, called a
brownstone. In
Philadelphia,
Baltimore,
San Francisco, and
Washington, they are simply called rowhouses or rowhomes, and are very common. In much of the
Southern United States, they are referred to as
rowhomes. The oldest continuously occupied road in America,
Philadelphia's
Elfreth's Alley, is lined with rowhouses.
*
Summerson, John,
1947. "
John Wood and the English town-planning tradition" collected in
Heavenly Mansions (1963).
* Summerson,
Georgian London.
*
Back-to-back houses*
Duplex*
Semi-detached*
Townhouse*
Shotgun house*
List of house types*
Gentrification*
Australian architectural styles
