Terrace houses and what their narrow fronts mean

Reference library · 1098 words

The single fronted terrace is the defining house type of inner Melbourne, and its defining feature is its width. A modest example presents perhaps four metres to the street: a front door at one edge, one window beside it, a veranda across the whole of that narrow face, and a parapet above with a name and sometimes a date moulded into it. Behind that four metres the block runs back thirty or forty. The proportions are not an accident of taste. They are the direct physical expression of how urban land was sold and serviced in the nineteenth century.

Land was priced, rated and serviced by frontage. A subdivider buying a block and cutting it into allotments maximised return by making each allotment as narrow as the building regulations allowed and as deep as the block permitted. Water mains, drains and street works were charged against the length of street a property occupied, so a narrow lot carried less of the road's cost. The result, repeated tens of thousands of times across Carlton, Fitzroy, Collingwood, Richmond, North Melbourne, South Melbourne, Port Melbourne, Prahran and Windsor, was a housing stock optimised for street length rather than for living.

What a narrow front does to a plan

Once you fix the width, everything else follows. A single fronted terrace has a hall running down one side from the front door, with rooms opening off it in a line. The front room, the best room, faces the street. Behind it comes a second bedroom, then usually a step down into a lower, later, cheaper structure at the rear containing the kitchen and the living space, often built in a single skin of brick or in timber where the front is brick. That rear section is why terrace renovations in Melbourne so overwhelmingly involve knocking out the back of the house: the front two rooms are heritage controlled and structurally sound, and the back is neither.

The party wall is the other governing fact. Terrace houses share structural walls with their neighbours, which means no side windows on either flank. Every scrap of natural light must come from the front, the rear, or a skylight, and this single constraint explains a great deal about how inner Melbourne looks from the inside: the long dim hall, the borrowed light over doors, the obsession with rear extensions that open north. Building regulations requiring fire walls to continue up through the roof produced the stepped parapet skyline that a terrace row presents from across the street, each house separated from the next by a raised division of brickwork.

Behind the row runs the back lane. These bluestone laneways were not romantic. They existed because Melbourne had no sewerage system for the first sixty years of its existence, and the outdoor closet at the end of each yard was emptied by nightsoil carts that needed rear access. The city's reputation for smell in the 1880s was well earned and produced a nickname the local press was happy to use. The Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works was created in 1891 specifically to fix it, and the first houses were connected to a reticulated sewerage system toward the end of that decade. The lanes remained, and were used for coal, wood, rubbish and the garage that eventually replaced the outhouse.

The laneway myth

Melbourne now markets its laneways as one of its principal attractions, and the story told about them is largely wrong. Two quite separate networks get conflated. The residential back lanes described above are service alleys behind terrace rows. The famous central laneways are something else: the Hoddle Grid was laid out in very large blocks, and from the 1840s onward those blocks were subdivided by narrow streets and private rights of way to give access to the interiors. That is the origin of Little Collins Street, Little Bourke Street and Flinders Lane, and of the smaller passages between them.

For most of their history these were not charming. They held stables, workshops, warehouses, rag trade sweatshops, cheap lodging and, in the case of the notorious slum areas around them, some of the worst housing conditions in the colony. Central Melbourne emptied out after business hours through much of the twentieth century, and the lanes were places you avoided at night. The transformation into a network of bars and cafes was a deliberate policy achievement of the late 1980s and 1990s, driven by liquor licensing reform that made small venues viable, by council programs to bring residents back into the central city, and by a sustained municipal effort to activate the lanes. It is a genuine success. It is not an ancient bohemian tradition, and treating it as one obscures how much work it took.

What the narrow front means now

The economics have inverted completely. A house type built as cheap rental accommodation for working people, on the smallest lot a speculator could legally create, is now among the most expensive residential property in Australia by land area. Proximity to the centre, tram routes at the end of the street and heritage protection have combined to make the shortcomings of these houses irrelevant to their price. Meanwhile the same narrowness that made them cheap makes them awkward to adapt, which is why the standard inner Melbourne renovation is so recognisable: original front rooms preserved under a heritage overlay, a glass box on the back, a small courtyard where the yard and the outhouse were.

There is a subtler point about density. Single fronted terraces on four metre frontages achieve a residential density that modern planning rules would struggle to permit, without towers, without lifts and without structured parking. Streets in Carlton and Fitzroy hold a great many households per hectare in buildings two storeys high. That is one reason planners keep returning to the terrace as a model, and one reason arguments about inner Melbourne's housing supply so often come back to what the Victorians did casually and we now find difficult.

Finally, the parapets repay attention. Terrace rows were often built in one operation by one builder and named as a group, and the name and the year are frequently there in render above the veranda. Reading them along a street tells you the sequence of a suburb's construction, and where a run of dates stops abruptly at the start of the 1890s you are looking at the edge of the land boom, the moment the credit disappeared and the builder walked away. The narrow front is a record of land economics; the parapet is a record of when the money ran out.

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