Terraced house
In architecture and city planning, a terrace(d), row house, 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.
In the United Kingdom
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 100m2 cheaper to maintain and inhabit on average each year."
In Australia
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 single-storey cottages in working-class suburbs. The most common building material used was brick, often covered with stucco. Many Melbourne terraces featured a unique style of polychrome brickwork, influenced heavily by the early work of local architect Joseph Reed.
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 the 1950s, many urban renewal programs were aimed at eradicating them entirely in favour of hi-rise development. In recent decades these inner-city areas and their terraced houses have been gentrified. With their increasing rarity, they are now highly sought after in Australia, and often due to their proximity to the CBD of the major cities, also highly expensive.
With artificial urban boundaries, new townhouse type developments often nostalgically evoking old style terraces in a post-modern style returned to the favour of local planning offices in many suburban areas.
Melbourne
Melbourne's flat terrain has produced regular terraced house patterns, and the wealth of the gold rush fuelled speculative housing development and also ensured that many terraces were built with ornate and elaborate details in a plethora of different styles. Melbourne has more decorative cast iron than any other city in the world 1 and much of this was used to decorate its terrace houses in the filigree style with decorative cast iron balconies.
The earliest surviving terrace house in Melbourne is Glass Terrace, 72-74 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy (1853-54). Royal Terrace at 50-68 Nicholson Street Carlton, completed three years later is only slightly younger and is the oldest surviving complete row.
Terraced housing became prevalent in the Melbourne suburbs of Middle Park, Albert Park, North Melbourne, South Melbourne, Carlton, Collingwood, Fitzroy, St Kilda, East St Kilda, Port Melbourne, Richmond, West Melbourne, Footscray, Hawthorn, Abbortsford, Burnley, South Yarra, Cremorne, Brunswick, Parkville, Flemington and Elsternwick. Some of the more notable examples include the heritage registered Tasma Terrace, Canterbury, Clarendon Terrace, Burlington Terrace, Cypress Terrace, Dorset Terrace, Nepean Terrace and Annerly Terrace (East Melbourne), Blanche Terrace, Cobden Terrace, Holyrood Terrace (Fitzroy), Rochester Terrace and the St Vincent Gardens precinct (Albert Park), Royal Terrace, Holcombe Terrace, Denver Terrace, Dalmeny House & Cramond House, and Benvenuta (Carlton), Marion Terrace (St Kilda) and Finn Barr (South Melbourne).
Marion Terrace in St Kilda, Victoria
Row Housing in East St Kilda
Elaborate three storey Victorian terraces in Drummond Street Carlton, Victoria.
Holcombe Terrace. One of Melbourne's best examples of the filligree style in polychrome brick. Drummond Street Carlton, Victoria
Late Victorian terrace houses in Fitzroy, Victoria
Rochester Terrace in St Vincent Gardens, Albert Park
Denver Terrace. Drummond Street Carlton, Victoria
Victorian terrace houses in South Melbourne, Victoria
Victorian terrace houses in Middle Park, Victoria
Victorian filigree style housing in Windsor, Victoria
Timber decorated terrace houses in Middle Park, Victoria
Three storey early Victorian terraces in Lonsdale Street, Melbourne CBD.
French styled towers at St Vincent Gardens, Albert Park, Victoria
Modest terrace housing in Cremorne, Victoria
British styled terrace basement, four storey terrace in South Yarra, Victoria
Sydney
Like Melbourne, Sydney also is home to a large amount of terraced housing. Suburbs where terrace housing is highly prevalent includes The Rocks, Paddington, Glebe, Surry Hills, Darlinghurst and Balmain. Due to the city's higher density, it is not unusual to find terrace houses of up to three storeys and the undulating topography of the city means that many of the terraces are typically staggered up hills rather than level or uniform. Some of the more notable examples include the heritage registered Cliff Terrace (Glebe).
In contrast to the British practice of the day, where dozens or even hundreds of houses were constructed by a developer as a single housing estate, Sydney practice was normally to build a short run of houses, an interesting example being the "Castle Terrace" in Paddington. Consisting of five houses, the middle one has been given a distinctive treatment.
Most Sydney terraces are firmly anchored into solid sandstone, which provided an opportunity to follow the British practice of constructing a basement storey below street level, reached by a flight of stairs down from the street. Many examples of this are to be found in Paddington. In the suburb of Balmain, there are examples of houses actually constructed from local sandstone, rather than bricks covered with stucco.
Terrace Houses, The Rocks, Sydney
Very old cottages The Rocks, Sydney
Typical Paddington Terrace marching downhill, Sydney
Castle Terrace in Paddington, Sydney
A derelict row in Darlinghurst, Sydney
A British-style basement in Paddington, Sydney
Sandstone-fronted terrace in Balmain, Sydney
A full bay-windowed end of terrace in Balmain, Sydney
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Brisbane
In Brisbane, Queensland, stone and attached building was disfavoured outside of government buildings, and in fact legislated against by the Undue Subdivision of Land Prevention Act 1885. Enacted as a public health and anti-slum measure, this act set a minimum frontage of about 10 metres for each residential block, thus effectively ending the building of terraces. So only a handful of elaborate heritage listed examples exist, mostly clustered in the Central Business District (The Mansions and Harris Terrace on George Street and Petrie Terrace on Petrie Terrace), and a handful of singular rows the inner suburbs (Cook's Terrace on Coronation Drive, Milton and Edmonstone Street in West End). Nostalgic replicas, however, are popular in Brisbane, with some notable examples, built in the 1980s and 1990s in mock Victorian style along Gregory Terrace.
The Mansions, Brisbane CBD
A mixed row in Normanby, Inner Brisbane
Cook's Terrace overlooking the river in Milton, Brisbane
A semi-detached pair in Edmonstone Street, West End, Brisbane
Other Australian Cities
Examples of terrace housing outside of Sydney and Melbourne are less common, but are to be found mainly in Adelaide, Perth and Newcastle, with examples in Hobart and some provincial cities. For reasons given above, terraces are extremely rare in Brisbane.
The planned city of Adelaide, South Australia has perhaps the most terrace houses of any other capital city, Marine Apartments in the suburb of Grange, is particularly notable, as it is a large three story filligree terrace.
In Perth, Western Australia there are a handful of examples in the inner city and Fremantle's Point Street.
Some smaller provincial Australian cities also have examples of terrace housing.
Tasmania, being one of the oldest European settlements has a number of good examples despite the relative size of its major cities in comparison to mainland cities. Inner Hobart has some good examples of terrace housing. Launceston has some great examples as well (mostly in the Central Business District and East Launceston), including Alpha Terrace, which has striking similarities to many of the terraces in Sydney's hilly suburbs.
Outside of Melbourne in Victoria, Ballarat has some scattered existing terrace houses and semi-detached houses, as do the older cities of Portland and Port Fairy.
Outside of Sydney in New South Wales, Newcastle has a fine collection of 1890s terraces. Almost all of them be found in a conservation area just east of the Central Business District on The Terrace, Wolfe Street, Tyrell Street, Bull Street and Watts Street, including Buchanans Terrace (c1890).
In the United States
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 Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., they are simply called row houses or row homes, and are very common.
In much of the Southern United States, they are referred to as row homes. The oldest continuously occupied road in America, Philadelphia's Elfreth's Alley, is lined with row houses.
Row houses in Baltimore's Charles Village neighborhood
San Francisco's "Painted Ladies" on Steiner Street, Alamo Park
Row houses along Dartmouth Street in Boston South End
Townhome Condominiums in Atlanta
Sources and further reading
Summerson, John, 1947. "John Wood and the English town-planning tradition" collected in Heavenly Mansions (1963).
Summerson, Georgian London.