Victorian Terrace

A Victorian terrace is a row of houses built in Britain between about 1840 and 1910, in which each house shares its side walls with its neighbors. Most are two or three stories, built of brick or stone with slate roofs, and chimney stacks rise along the party walls, the walls shared between houses. Windows are vertical sliding sashes. Many houses have a bay window projecting from the front wall on one or both floors, with patterned brick or tiles as decoration. The smallest type, the two-up two-down, has two rooms on each floor.

Saltaire, near Bradford (1851-1871), is a planned village of stone terraces that Sir Titus Salt built for workers at his woollen mill. Byelaw terraces, built under the Public Health Act 1875, fill whole districts of northern English and Welsh towns, each house with a rear yard opening onto a back alley. Georgian terraces of the 18th century have flat fronts and plain openings; Victorian terraces add bay windows and more applied ornament.

Terraces first became fashionable in London and Bath in the 1720s and 1730s as uniform rows for wealthy residents. In the Victorian period, small builders built them speculatively for rent as industrial towns grew, and the terrace became the usual form of dense urban housing. Much early working-class housing was built as back-to-back houses, which shared a rear wall and had no through ventilation. The Public Health Act 1875 required councils to regulate housing with byelaws, which set minimum street widths, damp-proof courses and a private yard with a toilet behind each house, reached by a back alley for the collection of waste.

A 1909 law banned new back-to-back houses nationally, though Leeds continued to build improved back-to-backs until 1937. The terrace also spread through the British Empire: most of the terraces of inner Sydney and Melbourne date from the 1850s to the 1890s and carry cast-iron ornament known as iron lace. Many British terraces were cleared in the slum clearance programs of the 20th century, but byelaw terraces still made up more than 15 percent of the United Kingdom's housing stock in 2011.