The Terraced House Through Time

In a country where privacy is demanded and gardens are treasured but urban space is limited and land expensive, the terraced house has long been the most economical solution for housing.

By looking at the form, style and details on a terrace you can discover their age and the type of people they were originally built for.

Article updated: July 2026

Terraced Housing

The terrace belongs to no single social class. It ranges from the graceful stone-faced Georgian crescents and white painted Victorian townhouses in exclusive city locations to the monotonous rows of humble red brick homes which characterise many old industrial areas. Its size seems to change simply to suit the people it was built for.

However, the terrace has developed over the centuries in response to social changes, industrial growth and catastrophic disasters.

The Great Fire of London

When Thomas Farriner's bakery in Pudding Lane, London, caught fire one Sunday morning in September 1666 few would have thought that this would result in a chain of events which would change the face of British housing.

Urban areas had developed with little control over their planning and areas became crammed with timber and thatch buildings overhanging narrow winding streets.

This disorganised maze of ramshackle properties created a flammable cocktail which fuelled the Great Fire of London. The vast scale of this conflagration finally forced the authorities to lay down legislation to help prevent it occurring again.

The legislation came as a series of acts and regulations, at first in the Capital and later out in the provinces. These rules required brick or stone walls, tiled roofs and party walls, so that fire could not spread along timbers in the roof.

Part of the process involved the establishment of different classes of building, their dimensions and even the width of associated streets. This helped shape the form of new terraced houses which would be built during the rebuilding of the Capital.

Design Features Through Time

Some of the changes can be used to help date houses. Sash windows are one example. They were introduced in the late 17th century and at first sat flush with the outer wall. Early in the next century, legislation required sash windows to be set back four inches, to reduce the risk of fire spreading along a facade.

They went further still from the 1770s when the outer frame or box had to be fully hidden behind the outer wall by which time they began to be fitted with thinner glazing bars and larger pieces of glass.

The Great Fire of London came not long after the monarchy returned from exile, bringing back a taste for the Classical style. The familiar form of terraced house evolved partly to reflect that style's desire for symmetry and fine proportions.

Ideally the door would be placed in the middle. But a central door would have left a thin room on each side of it. So the entrance was placed to one side, with the main entertaining rooms on the first floor above.

By the mid 18th century these first floor rooms would often be taller than the others with larger windows and decorative details to emphasise its importance.

An Early Georgian Terrace

In an early Georgian terrace, the service rooms were in the basement below. From the second half of the 18th century, a half basement became more common. It let more light into the rooms below. It also meant the front door was reached up a short flight of stairs, which made for a more impressive entrance.

This difference in form can help date early and late Georgian terraces.

A Late Georgian Terrace

Added to this was the greater number of household staff which needed to be housed, hence terraced houses became taller, often with four or five storeys and attic rooms above for servants' accommodation. Up until the mid-Victorian period, fashionable Classical style terraces had their roofs hidden behind a parapet and the exterior covered in stucco (a smooth render coloured to imitate stone but now usually painted white).

The Early 19th Century

The main rooms in a large house had been flexible spaces with furniture moved around to suit different uses, but by the early 19th century there were more individual rooms with specific roles.

However, by the 1860s the popularity of the Gothic Revival resulted in many being built with a steeply pitched roof open to the front and exposed yellow or red brick walls.

Gothic Revival houses often featured a triangular gable end to one side and pointed dormer windows set in the roof above to emphasise the asymmetry of this style.

The Queen Anne Style

By the 1880s and 90s, the 'Queen Anne' and 'Arts and Crafts' styles influenced suburban terraces. Sash windows had their top pane divided by glazing bars and the upper half of walls covered in a rough finish render, mock timber framing or hanging tiles.

Edwardian Houses

Edwardian versions often featured white painted external woodwork on porches and balconies with chimneys emerging from the roof halfway down the slope rather than at the ridge.

There were few large-scale building companies in the 19th century. As a result, most of these terraces were built in short rows. Sometimes different builders put up each row. Sometimes the same builder did, but only built the next few houses after the previous ones had been leased out.

Dating a Terraced House

Today, a long row of terraces might appear all the same but look closer and you will see vertical joints and gaps in brickwork or slight differences in details which highlight different periods of building.

The photograph below illustrates this well. To the left, you can see a house built in the late 17th century whereas the house to the right was built in the late 18th century.

For the growing middle classes, more modest terraces evolved to which a few mass-produced details could be added to imitate the fashionable homes of the well off.

In the first half of the 19th century, a popular form was the squat two up two down terrace, with the upper windows tight under the eaves. As income and expectations rose, terraces designed to attract the middle classes grew taller, with higher ceilings and a steeper roof. They often had a third storey or dormer windows too, so the loft could provide sleeping accommodation for a live-in maid.

You can often tell the date of these terraces from the extensions made to the front and rear. A single bay window on the ground floor room was popular in the 1850s and 60s, two storey bays became fashionable on this class of home later in the century.

In early examples, rear extensions were added at ground floor level to provide a scullery. From the 1870s these extensions often had two storeys, creating an extra bedroom above. Today they have usually been converted into a kitchen and bathroom.

On most of this class of terrace, the front door opens directly onto the pavement. But as Victorians sought privacy, builders created tiny walled spaces a few feet deep in front, to imitate the large walled gardens of the finest houses.

By the Edwardian period this was a standard feature and in suburban areas allowed for a modest garden and tiled (often black and white) path to the front door which was now usually sheltered by a porch.

As working-class families began flooding into new industrial areas most found accommodation in a single room within a larger house or in cramped homes in the yards or around courts at the rear of them.

Builders and landlords began developing terraces for this class. To maximise their return, they crammed as many houses into a plot as possible. There was little control from local authorities over the overall planning of these rapidly expanding urban areas.

These new terraces took a variety of forms with different types popular in certain regions but the most notorious were the back-to-backs. These usually had just a small living room, a cellar, below, and a bedroom above and backed onto the house behind so there was no rear garden and you could not throw the windows open to ventilate the house.

For many residents, these poorly designed terraces were an improvement over what they were used to but with limited space, poor sanitation and a communal toilet many of these developments would later become slums.

Those in better-paid jobs might be able to rent a two up two down with their own privy in the rear yard. As wages slowly improved, this form became more widely available to working-class families by the end of the Victorian period.

However, for those trapped in the slums, there was little drive from the authorities to address the situation so it was down to benevolent individuals and charities to develop new forms of working-class housing.

They focused on building accommodation which provided through ventilation, running water, and a privy at the back of the yard.

Most back-to-backs and similar, early forms of working-class housing have long since been flattened although some of the better examples still survive in cities like Leeds or at the rears of large urban houses. Terraced houses remain a staple of UK buy-to-let today, and the period features described here still shape what an investment property in a Victorian or Edwardian terrace is worth. Working out a terrace's age is a handy first step in property due diligence, before a survey checks its condition.

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