Firstly we must define our terms: I am going to assume we mean the traditional working class terraced house rather than some fancy Georgian effort in Bath or central London!
Are owner occupiers tending to renovate these to bring them up to 21st century standard
no: I quite like going for a carp at the end of the garden every night!
do you think we live in hovels? Of course they are upgraded.
I have lived in terraced housing the majority of my adult life and they are ideal small houses for younger people or starter families. They are generally 2/3 bed houses, relatively cheap to buy and run, easy to repair, absolutely solid construction and (generally) with few issues on the title deeds or documents.
they CAN be cold in winter but that can be fixed by getting the roof space insulation up to modern standards. As they are solid brick construction there is no cavity to fill and external cladding/insulation looks awful and isn't, imo, worth the bother.
I have both owned and rented. My house now is the only house I could afford in the town when I bought it. it needed a complete refurbishment back to bare brick as it had not been touched since the 1960's in my estimation. You can see the work required on the pictures on my Flickr stream. It needed new electrics, plumbing and gas fittings, new sanitary & kitchen fittings and a complete replaster. I was also able to create a small toilet/shower room in what was the old toilet AND extend the kitchen! I also needed some roof work to the underfelt and battens and things like a complete guttering and flashing replacement but NOT a new roof thankfully!
I would say mine is a typical working class 2 bed terraced house. Victorian period construction of VERY solid local brick. Initially there would be 2 rooms downstairs. A front/sitting room with a bay window (!) and a rear kitchen. There were two bedrooms upstairs. There are big fireplaces in all 4 rooms (now blanked off but still operable) There was no bathroom. A toilet and coal shed combo was attached to the rear of the house but accessed from the yard.
At some point (and I cant work out the date from the deeds) a small rear 2 story extension was erected moving the kitchen into the extension ground floor and the bathroom above. There must have been a coal range in the kitchen as a large rear chimney was added This created a back room! very posh! All of the houses in the area were similarly altered. However the outside toilet was retained.
When I moved in I still had an outside toilet ( as well as an inside one) but I renovated and "knocked through" to extend the kitchen. Interestingly the bathroom in this house is bigger than some of the bedrooms in my other terraced houses. It is also attached to the second bedroom so it must have meant little privacy for the users of the back bedroom. Several houses in the street have taken some of the back room space to create a corridor to turn the bathroom into a third bedroom but mine retains three BIG upstairs rooms.
In my area there are few rear extensions as space is limited but you often see a bigger rear extension on terraced houses to accommodate another bedroom. These days people also extend into the loft space as my neighbours have done. my loft is very tall and could easily offer another large room at the expense of the space needed on the first floor for the stairs.
My house is REALLY solid. It isn't going anywhere short of them building a motorway or HS3!
I am not so sure how common shared toilets were, at least between houses with their own front doors. I would have thought that more typical was the toilet at the back of each house, although this would be used by all occupants of a property.
Correct - this is standard in my experience although I am sure there were differences, especially in the earlier types. There was no bathroom of course until much , much later!
My maternal grandparents lived in an end-terrace Coal Board house which (originally) had a toilet which was integrated into the structure of the building but accessed by an external door with no internal connection. In later years, one of the internal walls was knocked through to create a new doorway, and the old external door was bricked up.
yes - standard. At some point later I assume they got the standard bathroom extension
no one has a shared toilet - surely! it is 2024 not 1824!
looking at the terraced houses I have lived in I cant see evidence of there ever having been shared toilets although I have seen deeds for slightly older houses with shared wash blocks & cess pits at the end of the back lane. ( they tend to have gone when the town in question extended and more terraces were built over them)
All of mine have had the standard two door outbuilding: one side coal store, the other side toilet. ( variation: whether it was connected to the house or the back yard wall - I suspect it depends where the sewer ran)
EDIT - I think the shared toilet may be more common with a "back to back" house, which while a terraced construction is not quite the same thing.
Far better to separate the toilet from the living quarters and maintain hygiene
that was plumbing quality/materials related though. It was a problem in the early days
Not only due to the method of wall construction but also many have effectively shared loft space. So for loft insulation to be fully effective it needs for the whole terrace to be done at once. But with private ownership being the norm this is very difficult to co-ordinate, certainly something that really needs some sort of government intervention. I'm not holding my breath!
mine will have had a common loft space along the terrace at some point but the gap has been closed up with more modern brickwork at an unknown date. On purchasing this will always be mentioned on your survey report as a fire/security risk but in honesty I doubt I would have done anything about it due to the additional costs involved in the work.
