Rebuilding the Terraced House: Contemporary spatial norms in the older housing stock
The speculative terraced houses of nineteenth-century England continue to characterise London’s residential environment.According to Valuation Office Agency statistics for 2018, 35% of the dwelling units in London were built before 1900 and 51% before 1939, and most of these were houses. Valuation Office Agency, ‘CTSOP 3.1: Number of properties by Council Tax band, property build period and region, county, local authority district and lower and middle super output area’, in Council Tax: Stock of Properties, 2018, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/council-tax-stock-of-properties-2018. While the streetscapes largely retain the highly standardised original architectural features, the interiors have been altered in various ways. Some of them have their interior layouts reorganised, some were extended and enlarged towards the backyard, the attic, and in some cases, below ground, and some others, especially those in central areas, were partitioned into flats.According to the 2011 edition of the English Housing Survey, in the UK, 73.5% of dwellings built before 1919 (which are largely Victorian terraced houses) had at least one major alteration such as (from the most common to the least) extensions, rearrangement of internal space, complete refurbishment, conversion to more than one dwelling and loft conversions. Department for Communities & Local Government, 'English Housing Survey: HOMES - Annual Report on England’s Housing Stock, 2011' (London: Department for Communities and Local Government, 2013), Annex Table AT1.21: Dwellings with any major modifications since built by dwelling age, 2011. However varied the spaces they created might be, these alterations help maintain the housing infrastructure in line with the contemporary expectations from and understandings of dwellings and domestic spaces.
How are contemporary spatial norms reproduced within the Victorian terraced house? In this paper, I present a spatial and social analysis of terraced house alterations, drawing upon multiple types of sources: quantitative data derived from floor plans of terraced houses available in online planning systems and qualitative data collected from London’s residents. While the literature from social sciences on renovations has paid a great deal of attention to the understandings, motivations and processes of renovations, systematic analyses that integrate design aspects are sparse.Stewart Brand, How Buildings Learn: What Happens after They’re Built (London: Phoenix Illustrated, 1997). Understading how contemporary spatial norms are understood, translated, negotiated and reproduced in the existing housing stock can help identify design features that support adaptability that made the uninterrupted usage of terraced houses for more than a century possible.
Alterations and Spatial Norms
The built form of dwellings embodies certain ideologies of home, that are the ‘dominant conventions about both the conduct of relationships within the household and the relationship of the household to the outside world’.Alison Blunt and Robyn Dowling, Home (London: Routledge, 2006). The Victorian terraced house — its size, spatial organisation, and materials — reflected the labour and care practices and morals of the nineteenth-century family.Harold James Dyos, 'The Speculative Builders and Developers of Victorian London', Victorian Studies, Supplement: Symposium on the Victorian City (2), 11 (1968): 641–90; John Burnett, A Social History of Housing: 1815-1970 (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1978).
Highly standardised in its dimensions, layouts and materials — thanks to the pattern books that allowed any speculative developer to build them — the Victorian terraced house had a deep floor plate with a narrow street frontage and a small backyard.Dyos, 'The Speculative Builders and Developers of Victorian London'. It was vertically separated into day and night uses with common areas (day) located on the ground floor, and bedrooms (night), on the upper floors. It had three rooms on the ground floor, a parlour, a living room, and a scullery, that were organised from entrance to backyard in an order from public to private and clean to dirty.Roderick J Lawrence, 'The Organization of Domestic Space', Ekistics, January 1, 1979, 135–39; Ritsuko Ozaki, 'The `front’ and `back’ Regions of the English House: Changing Values and Lifestyles', Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 18, no. 2 (2003): 105–27; Richard Roger, Housing in Urban Britain 1780-1914, New Studies in Economic and Social History (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1989); Victoria Kelley, '“The Virtues of a Drop of Cleansing Water”: Domestic Work and Cleanliness in the British Working Classes, 1880–1914', Women’s History Review 18, no. 5 (2009): 719–35. The front room or parlour, was commonly reserved for special occasions such as Sundays and holidays, and typically furnished with objects of status. The middle room was the heart of the home, used for sitting, meals, and interactions. The scullery or back kitchen, where the water supply was installed, was dedicated to specific dirty tasks, such as washing up and laundry, and was not a space to be in. The WC was typically installed out in the backyard. On the first floor, there were two or three bedrooms, zoned, with space permitting, according to age and gender (parents’ room, boys’ room, and girls’ room). These were often unheated and used only for sleeping.
How has this layout been altered? To answer this question, I analysed the floor plans of 120 of such terraced houses. These houses were built in the same decade, before 1900, in a neighbourhood in East London. While larger terraced houses in more central areas had mostly been converted into flats in the 1980s, smaller ones, usually in the Victorian urban fringes, are still used as single-family homes.Chris Hamnett, 'Gentrification and the Middle-Class Remaking of Inner London, 1961-2001', Urban Studies 40, no. 12 (2003): 2401–26. East London is one such location that has been witnessing expanding waves of gentrification in the past decades, which exacerbate the transformation of housing infrastructure.
I collected the floor plans from the online planning system of the corresponding London borough. All boroughs in London, and in the UK in general, have created online systems through which planning applications that cover roughly the past ten to fifteen years can be accessed online.For an example of such planning system please visit: https://hackney.gov.uk/planning-searches These platforms are publicly accessible and allow people to view and comment on the planning proposals. These online systems hold a massive amount of data including architectural drawings for existing buildings and proposed alterations. But they are rarely analysed, even by the local authorities themselves, and are viewed only as repositories.
While online planning systems offer a great source to understand changes in the building stock, they are also limited as not all alterations require planning permission. For instance, interior changes, most of the time, do not require planning permission. Permitted development rights also allow back extensions without the need for planning permission if certain depth, height and volume requirements are satisfied.The Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015, No. 596. While for some alterations that could fall under permitted development, full planning applications were submitted, and some permitted developments were registered in the planning systems for building control purposes, we cannot confidently say that all changes to dwellings are registered in these systems. Therefore, my analysis considers only major alterations.
I analysed floor plans by comparing them to one another and to the original nineteenth-century terraced house layout of this neighbourhood. This was a visual and quantitative analysis of the types of extensions, rooms and amenities added and removed, changes made to walls separating the rooms in the original layout, and new kitchen layouts. Terraced houses were originally very similar. I simultaneously coded the changes observed relative to the original terraced house layout and each other, while generating codes for every space, wall and opening.
This analysis showed repeating spatial patterns in new layouts. For brevity, I will report only the changes made to the ground floors. All houses I analysed were extended towards the back on the ground floor, enlarging the living areas. Extensions were made in several ways. In some of them, they were added to the back of the existing projections, where the original kitchens were located. In some others, they were added to the side of these projections, squaring off the originally L-shaped ground floors. In others, they were added in both directions, creating a deeper plan. Ranging up to 6m, these extensions brought the depth of ground floors to an average of 12m, and added, on average, 15m2 of floor space.
Back extensions were rarely undertaken to create additional habitable rooms at the back of the ground floor. Even though there were a few extended ground floors in which the front rooms were used as bedrooms, additional bedrooms were generally created by loft extensions in the attic, keeping the first floors with bedrooms and the original vertical day and night division intact.They were mostly undertaken to enlarge the kitchens. It is inevitable that the back extensions have an impact on kitchens that were originally located at the back. However, kitchens were not only enlarged with longer worktops, more storage and additional dining spaces but also but also combined and merged with the rooms in the main part of the house in a variety of ways. Walls separating extended kitchens from the middle rooms, and middle rooms from the front rooms were variously moved or removed or large openings were added to them. As a result, in new layouts, the separations between the three original rooms — parlour, living room, and kitchen — became less clear, and in some cases, non-existent. These changes suggest that kitchens were not merely by-products of extensions but are the focus of extensions.
The additional floor area was also used to add new amenity spaces, i.e. bathrooms, WCs, storage, and utility rooms. Storage and utility rooms, which do not require natural lighting were mostly located in the middle of the floor plan.
Redesigning Homes
While studying floor plans gives an idea about the spatial patterns, they are limited in terms of linking these spatial changes to the understandings, framings and motivations of alterations. Despite the spatial patterns observed, alterations are, most of the time, individual processes undertaken by different people at different times that result in different spaces. To explore the motivations and considerations in alterations, I draw upon interview data that I collected as part of the larger project.Seyithan Özer and Alasdair Jones, 'Changing Socio-Spatial Definitions of Sufficiency of Home: Evidence from London (UK) before and during the Covid-19 Stay-at-Home Restrictions', International Journal of Housing Policy, 2022, 1–26.
I collected these data via an online survey that included open-ended questions and follow-up semi-structured interviews. They included a broad set of questions about daily routines, particular uses of rooms, and experiences of individual spaces. Even though the participants were not from the houses I analysed, some of them were living in similar houses and had undertaken alteration projects. For instance, when asked whether they use their home as laid out when they moved into their homes and list the changes they have made, some of them replied with ‘extension added, to make the kitchen, dining and sitting area all one’, ‘filling in the side return, knocked the dining and kitchen into one room’, ‘rear and side return extension creating an extra living room zone in the new kitchen’.76 respondents (out of 239, 32%) said they had made some changes and 15 survey participants listed extensions and major remodelling of interiors as the changes they have made. Moreover, 5 out of 21 interview participants discussed extensions they had made to their homes. Others mentioned other types of changes on ground floors: ‘knocked together two reception rooms to make one large space’, ‘took down the wall separating the dining room & kitchen’, ‘took out the door and knocked through part of the wall separating the living space from the stairs down to the flat's front door and up to the bedroom, opening up the flat for light and space’.
In addition to the motivations around energy performance and environmental comfort, the literature highlights cleanliness, convenience, and modern living as significant drivers for home renovations. Ellis P. Judson, Usha Iyer-Raniga, and Ralph Horne, 'Greening Heritage Housing: Understanding Homeowners’ Renovation Practices in Australia', Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 29, no. 1 (2014): 61–78. The interview data showed a number of such motivations and considerations in ground floor alterations. When discussing their larger, combined kitchens, interview participants referred to the inconvenience of having two separate spaces, a kitchen for the preparation and storage of meals and cleaning, and a dining room for the serving of meals. For instance, Jacob, who had just submitted a planning application for a back extension and layout change, reported: ‘we don't use the dining room […] we have enough space next to the kitchen, which is much easier to use. We're doing a little bit of rearrangement [...] an extension so that you can have the kitchen in the dining room.’
Interview participants acknowledged and referred to such understanding of the kitchen. For instance, Roshini, a working mum, who had recently built a side return extension noted that the older separation of living area into kitchen, dining room and living room did not work for them:
[prior to the extension] it wasn't great spending time in the kitchen […] it was a bit more awkward [...] the kitchen was a much more functional space […] the middle room was a dining room, but it never got used […] having the extension meant that the dining area has moved into the kitchen and there is also a play area and a bit of extra living space.
In fact, such spatial changes in kitchens and living spaces align with both the design preferences that can be observed in new-built dwellings and the literature from social sciences on home renovations. Combined kitchen and living room arrangements, as well as multiple bathrooms have been the norm in London’s new dwellings since the 2000s.Seyithan Özer and Sam Jacoby, 'Dwelling Size and Usability in London: A Study of Floor Plan Data Using Machine Learning', Building Research & Information, 2022, 1–15. Irene Cieraad argued that the separation of kitchens, living rooms and dining rooms sustained the gendered division of domestic spaces (who uses the kitchen for cooking, serving and cleaning), whereas the open plan reflected the ‘social equality between men and women, between parents and children.’ Irene Cieraad, '“Out of My Kitchen!” Architecture, Gender and Domestic Efficiency', The Journal of Architecture 7, no. 3 (2002): 276. Martin Hand and Elizabeth Shove related these to a shift in the understanding of cooking and eating as ‘sociable lifestyle activities’ and kitchens as ‘the places of leisure and as places the whole family thinks of as home’.Martin Hand and Elizabeth Shove, 'Orchestrating Concepts: Kitchen Dynamics and Regime Change in Good Housekeeping and Ideal Home, 1922–2002', Home Cultures 1, no. 3 (2004): 245–47.
To think about home alterations and spatial norms means to attend not only to the everyday — the functional uses of homes, needs, preferences and practices of owners and owner-occupants, but also to the meanings of home, and the broader issues in housing such as the lack of affordability and housing availability, financialisation of housing, asset-based welfare, and gentrification. Alterations contribute to the feelings and meanings of home such as safety, identity, attachment, belonging, control, pride and status.Julia Cook, 'Understanding Home Renovation as a Material Future-Making Practice', Sociology 55, no. 2 (2020): 384–99; Bronwyn Tanner, Cheryl Tilse, and Desleigh de Jonge, 'Restoring and Sustaining Home: The Impact of Home Modifications on the Meaning of Home for Older People', Journal of Housing For the Elderly 22, no. 3 (2008): 195–215. As residents alter their homes, they exercise control over their dwellings and attach new meanings to their dwellings. By re-designing the domestic space to better suit their needs and preferences, residents express their identity, aesthetic preferences and status.Michael Mackay and Harvey C. Perkins, 'DIY Dreams and the Potential of Home', Housing, Theory and Society 36, no. 1 (2019): 112–28; Minna Sunikka-Blank, Ray Galvin, and Carrie Behar, 'Harnessing Social Class, Taste and Gender for More Effective Policies', Building Research & Information 46, no. 1 (2017): 1–13; Elizabeth B. Silva and David Wright, 'Displaying Desire and Distinction in Housing', Cultural Sociology 3, no. 1 (2009): 31–50. In this way, alterations are also related to residents’ consumption choices and the decisions residents make when improving their houses are greatly influenced by the media, which contributes further to the reproduction of ‘contemporary ideologies of home’.Aneta Podkalicka and Esther Milne, 'Diverse Media Practices and Economies of Australian Home Renovators: Budgeting, Self-Education and Documentation', Continuum 31, no. 5 (2017): 694–705; Shae Hunter, 'Reflexive Renovation and the Future of Household Sustainability: The Role of Media and Imagination in Household Consumption', Geographical Research 58, no. 3 (2020): 214–25.
Terraced house alterations are entangled with broader urban and economic issues, too. In the context of London, where housing affordability is a significant problem, older stock in need of repair has been an attractive option for homeownership, as well as for those who have been amateur property speculators.Joe Moran, 'Early Cultures of Gentrification in London, 1955–1980', Journal of Urban History 34, no. 1 (2007): 101–21. Tim Butler and Garry Robson note that ‘[t]he history of gentrification in London over the past nearly 40 years has been largely one of upgrading of mainly [nineteenth-century] property by individuals or small-scale developers’.Tim Butler and Garry Robson, 'Social Capital, Gentrification and Neighbourhood Change in London: A Comparison of Three South London Neighbourhoods', Urban Studies 38, no. 12 (2001): 2145–62. See also: Chris Hamnett, 'City Centre Gentrification: Loft Conversions in London’s City Fringe', Urban Policy and Research 27, no. 3 (2009): 277–87.Extensions and alterations might also be a more feasible alternative for existing homeowners, who would like to upsize, or more generally require more space. Research has indicated that space shortages relative to space standards are more present in the terraced housing stock. However, at the same time, dwellings with three or more bedrooms are overall limited in London and are largely in the terraced housing stock. Moreover, new builds in London are generally blocks of flats, which do not have certain amenities such as a backyard, which are highly valued by Londoners. Property prices virtually multiply wih the number of bedrooms, making the costs of renovation significantly advantageous for households in need of more bedrooms.
Homes ‘embody the majority of [owners’] savings and secure the bulk of their debt’.Nicole Cook, Susan J. Smith, and Beverley A. Searle, 'Debted Objects: Homemaking in an Era of Mortgage-Enabled Consumption', Housing, Theory and Society 30, no. 3 (2013): 1–19. Maintenance of and investment into homes, in the form of renovations and alterations, is also essential to the maintenance of the exchange value of homes, hence the savings of owners, and this is particularly important in an asset-based welfare system.John Doling and Richard Ronald, 'Home Ownership and Asset-Based Welfare', Journal of Housing and the Built Environment 25, no. 2 (2010): 165–73. For instance, real estate websites list adding a bathroom, creating an open living space, extending the loft space for additional bedrooms, and even obtaining planning permission for an extension as ways to maintain and increase property value.ANAEA Propertymark, '“Doer-Uppers” Spent £48 Billion on Improvements', April 1, 2019.
During interviews, such financial considerations emerged. First, extensions require homeowners to have a certain level of financial capacity to cover the high costs of extensions.[10] Second, homeowners need to justify their investment financially. One of the interview respondents, Marion, explained:
[We wanted to extend the kitchen] but again, it was financial [...] you wouldn't be able to actually increase the value of the property because there is a ceiling price on those two-bedroom properties whatever you do. [A kitchen extension] would be nice, but I think this is not my forever home and there is only so much money we want to spend.
Possibilities and Limitations
The variety of extensions, conversions, and remodelling in the older housing stock proved that the terraced house typologies are flexible and they can accommodate a variety of living space arrangements, extra bedrooms and new amenities. The availability of space to extend backwards, double aspect design, and particularly, the disposition of entrance hall, staircase, and scullery on one side, and habitable rooms on the other, have enabled a variety of interior layouts.
At the same time, new alterations seem to be limiting any further changes, as the ground floors have become deeper than before. The original ground floor plan was designed to have the kitchen usually in a projection that spanned half the width of the house, and allowed the living room at the back to have a window facing the backyard. Extensions, particularly those added to the side of these projections, limit the natural lighting. Jacob, who created only a very short extension (~1 m) said:
what we have done is, is try and make an extension so that you can have the kitchen in the dining room. You could square it off [side return extension] but that becomes light and the bit in the middle of the house becomes dark again.
Connecting and opening the rooms to each other, to an extent, relieves the problem of air circulation and daylight. But it also requires a careful calculation. For instance, Roshini reported that:
currently […] when you're going down the corridor to the kitchen from the front door […] under the stairs, there's some storage and there's a toilet under there. And on the other side, there's kind of a little block that has got a door to it and that's got our washing machine boiler in. […] We could have extended that cupboard and made it more of a utility room. But we decided against that because it would have meant less light into the living room […] and we wouldn't have had that kind of semi open plan feeling between the two.
In addressing the natural lighting problem, the use of skylights and wide glazed windows and doors in rear extensions were very common. More creative solutions included small courtyards between the original back wall and extension to enable the original back room to have daylight and air.
However, these also suggest that they can no longer be extended or accommodate more partitioned floor plans, limiting the long-term usability of floor plans. What does this mean in the present urgency to understand and develop roadmaps for retrofitting the older housing stock in line with the net zero targets?
Conclusion
In this paper, my aim was not to provide an extensive analysis of terraced house alterations, but to explore what kind of issues they entail. Home alterations differ from new-built dwellings. The interview data shows that alterations can provide a lens to the contemporary spatial norms as they are understood, translated, negotiated and reproduced. But, to think about home alterations, means to attend not only to the the functional uses of homes, needs, preferences and practices of owners and owner-occupants, but also to meanings of home, and issues such as the lack of affordability and housing availability, financialisation of housing, asset-based welfare, and gentrification. This complexity requires socio-spatial methodologies that integrate multiple methods and sources.Denise L. Lawrence and Setha M. Low, 'The Built Environment and Spatial Form', Annual Review of Anthropology 19, no. 1 (1990): 453–505; Thomas F. Gieryn, 'A Space for Place in Sociology', Annual Review of Sociology 26, no. 1 (2000): 463–96; Setha M. Low and Denise Lawrence-Zúñiga, eds., The Anthropology of Space and Place: Locating Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003); Hilde Heynen, 'Space as Receptor, Instrument or Stage: Notes on the Interaction Between Spatial and Social Constellations', International Planning Studies 18, no. 3–4 (2013): 342–57.
The floor plan data, with the variety of extensions, conversions, and remodelling in the older housing stock showed that the terraced house typologies are flexible and they can accommodate a variety of living space arrangements. Architecturally, the availability of space to extend backwards, double aspect design, and particularly, the disposition of the entrance hall, staircase, and scullery on one side, and habitable rooms on the other accommodate a variety of interior layouts. There is much to learn from the housing stock if we want to build more flexible dwellings. But, at the same time, new alterations seem to be limiting any further changes, as the ground floors have become deeper than before. We must carefully consider what this means for the future of the existing housing stock.