The Victorians put our feeble housebuilding efforts to shame

The terraced house really began life in 1637, when William Newton, a rich Bedfordshire property developer, built a row of 14 houses in Great Queen Street, Covent Garden. It no longer survives, so the earliest standing example of the terraced house is Lindsey House in Lincoln’s Inn Fields in central London, built in 1640.

The Italian 16th-century palaces were slavishly copied for the first British terraced houses, with rusticated ground floors designed to give an appearance of rugged strength, great Corinthian pilasters and elaborate doorcases. When lined up together, these terraces look like enormous fantasy country houses, stretching for hundreds of yards in either direction.

The palazzo prototype set the pattern for every terraced house since, from Coronation Street to Belgravia – a series of identical houses that worked perfectly well as individual units but could also be joined together, ad infinitum, saving on space and building materials into the bargain.

There’s one problem with the British terraced house that tries to imitate the Italian Renaissance palace: the British weather doesn’t do the decent thing and imitate the Italian weather. And so the terrace ends up being a row of Italian palaces with distinctly British heavy-duty roofs and chimneys slapped on top of them.

Because we get more rain than the Italians, we need steeper roofs to throw the stuff off. The need for steep roofs was particularly acute in the 17th and early 18th centuries.

Before the easy and cheap transport of slate from Lord Penrhyn’s Caernarvonshire mines in 1765, heavy red roof tiles covered British roofs – our grey old cities used to be red old cities.

The king of the terraced house was Thomas Cubitt (1788-1855). In 1815 he essentially invented a sort of terraced house factory with his idea of a single, all-in-one contractor. This contractor supplied the building trade with every single fanlight, shoe-scraper and door-knocker your heart could want.

Bloomsbury, Camden, Islington and Belgravia in London and much of Brighton – Cubitt covered great tracts of these areas in the prettiest of mass-produced houses, setting a pattern for the whole of the 19th century.

In terraced houses, the heavy use of brick – particularly exposed brick – is a deeply British characteristic, symptomatic of our preference for the homespun, domestic look over the imposing, grand scale.

It helps that brick is cheaper than stone. Brick is also expressly English, rather than Scottish: the long brick terraces of Manchester and Liverpool give way, over the border, to the sandstone of Glasgow and the granite of Aberdeen.

The English devotion to brick is a relatively recent phenomenon. Between the departure of the Romans from Britain in 410 AD and the first surviving home-made brick at Little Coggeshall Abbey, Essex, in around 1225, the English lost the art of brick-making. For 800 years they could only reuse old Roman bricks.

Since then the English have perfected the art, although they did make some pretty hideous bricks along the way, including the screaming red bricks from Accrington, known as “Accrington bloods”, made from the local shales in the Lancashire coal measures.

After the Great Fire of London the new terraces were largely built in brick – often distinctive yellow-brown London stock brick made with local clay, much of it from Kent and Essex.

It made sense to manufacture bricks locally; because they were so heavy, they were expensive to move. Until as late as the Second World War, bricks were rarely transported more than 30 miles from the brickfields where they were manufactured.

So there you have, right on your doorstep, a cheap building material that lasts for centuries.

Fast-forward to today and our buildings, notably our schools, are at risk of falling down or burning because of aerated concrete and modern cladding. But you will notice Victorian built train stations and rows of houses still standing.

The only way forwards is backwards. Buy Victorian.

Harry Mount is author of How England Made the English (Penguin)