The English Terraced House (Stephan Muthesius)

At the very mention of the word “house”, I start asking questions. After all, houses are quite close to our hearts – we all grew up in a house. How does a house influence the way we live? Do people in big houses and in bungalows lead different lives? One of these questions that I ask whenever I see a new housing development is, why is there a preference today for detached and semi-detached houses over terraces? In some places today (Oxford and Cambridge) terraced houses are wildly fashionable, in other places (Hartlepool, Newcastle) they are slums to be removed and all traces obliterated.

So I turned to Stephan Muthesius, The English Terraced House (1984), with great anticipation. Will it answer my questions?

Sadly not. But is it fair to condemn a book so full of detail simply because it doesn’t ask the same questions you ask? Well, I think so. Especially because this book not only fails to answer the questions I had, but often fails on its own terms. Mr Muthesius has written about 100,000 words, so he should have space to answer some at least of these questions. And one question I have is why a book on the English Terraced house uses the American term “row house” when the book doesn’t consider American examples. 

Instead, what we have, although wonderfully detailed, is rather complacent, and uncritical. For many people, the horrors of industrialisation are revealed most starkly by row upon row of grim terraced housing imposed without feeling on Welsh valleys or Peak District hills; but there is little condemnation here. 

By concentrating on the English terraced house, the author fails to compare and contrast to determine what is distinctive about English development. It would be good to understand why so 19th- and early 20th-century housing in Danish towns is mainly flats, compared with terraced housing in England. Worse, he accepts without question many general assertions about things English that have no place in a scholarly essay: 

Architects and planners from abroad still come to study the English set-up, as they have done for the past hundred years. We have those better dwellings because we seem more capable of a more judicious, small-scale kind of planning than other countries.

 Notice the imperceptible shift from the third person to “we”. Muthesius doesn’t mention that his own father was one of those “architects from abroad” who became an evangelist for the garden city in the early years of the 20th century. This is another problem with The English Terraced House. Muthesius senior wrote about “The English House”, not “The English Terraced House”. Much of what Muthesius writes about – speculative development, building controls, the ‘ideal’ family dwelling – is not restricted only to terraced housing. The debate, and the results, were about housing generally, including many different building types. In fact the garden city development at Letchworth include few if any terraced houses. But all this is rather incidental to Muthesius, who devotes much more space to small-scale changes in style within the terraced house, as if it were unconnected with other types of accommodation. For the detailed information we are grateful, but it only represents a part of the story. There is no mention of the systematic development by Oxford and Cambridge colleges that led to the creation of much of the housing of those cities. 

I grew up in a terraced house in a suburb (Orpington) that pretended to be part of the garden city movement. There was a garden in front, a garden at the rear, and a small green area between our house and the other side of the street (with a sign saying “no ball games”). The fact that it was a terraced house was not really the point; the houses could have been detached or semi-detached, but the values would have been the same.   

The terraced house was a regional phenomenon. Although it is found in other countries, it appears to be something characteristic about the England and Wales (I don’t know enough about Ireland to judge), at a particular historical period, say between 1800 and 1960. Terraced houses are still being built, but far less frequently today. 

Does the book define its terms? I can find no definition of “terraced house” in it. It is a house adjoining others, with access only from the front or from both front and rear. They often (but not always) have access from front to back via a passageway, which is typically shared between several properties. 

One key implication of the terraced house is that it was typically built to minimize cost of development by sharing some of the outer walls with neighbouring properties. In other words, the terraced house is the result of a large-scale development rather than an individual builder creating one building at a time. One implication of the terraced house, in other words, is speculation. Muthesius does include speculation in the index, but the passages on speculation are few and unsatisfying: “it would be pointless even to try and give an account of all major speculative developments”. Why? For example, the pattern of some building in North Oxford makes much more sense when it is understood that the Oxford colleges parcelling out the land provided it to speculative builders in lots that could be bid for, which accounts for the variety of buildings in some streets rather than homogeneous development.

In fact, I find Muthesius’ book maddening for three reasons:

First, its accretion of detail without providing signposts to interpret it. The book is poorly organised. Page numbers are placed on the inside of pages, near the gutter, rather than the outside where a reader can see them more easily. Colour plates are scattered unsystematically through the book, so the reader has to hunt without a signpost. The index appears to have a reference for every proper name in the book, with no indication of major or minor references.

2.   Secondly, there is a failure to quote sources for many of its statements. References, where given, are often inadequate as a source. Here are some examples, the first three all from page one, none of which has an attribution:

Most town walls had lost their importance by the 16th century, and there was no need to squeeze into a narrow area within these walls, as there was in so many continental cities.

 

The leading “estates” in the country were often the most important developers of “estates” of houses in the towns. The use of the same word in both contexts is significant and seems peculiar to the English set-up.

 

The suburb developed early in England.

 

Work on the building site was generally well paid. [p28]

Finally, the book focuses on architectural detail when the real interest of terraced housing is not so much the architecture (much of it repetitive, low quality and lacking in innovation) as the social and political environment that led to this kind of housing being built. Plus, there is a more recent angle. The author seems almost unaware of the phenomenon he was participating in himself, as a lecturer living in Norwich in the 1970s, and choosing to occupy an older terraced house rather than a more contemporary house (a decision that might even have been slightly bohemian for its time). Today, in Cambridge, some of the most desired housing is to be found in poorly-built terraced housing largely for railway workers off Mill Road near Cambridge Station. How did terraced housing become so fashionable? The book doesn’t answer this question.  

4.     There are no references in the index for “housing association” or “council house” or “social housing”, but there are over 50 index references for “brick”. This suggests a sense of priorities many of us don’t share. Could the state raise standards and provide beauty?

To be fair, the merits of the book are many. There is a wealth of detail. This is a useful book to refer to. Many of the illustrations are fascinating and documents in themselves. Muthesius is clearly very well read on 19th-century books on housing, such as J J Stevenson, House Architecture (1880), and T Webster and Mrs W Parkes, An Encyclopedia of Domestic Economy, 1844. There is no denying their contemporary validity as primary sources.

But ultimately, at the end of the book, Muthesius returns to the issue that clearly concerns him most. Can the terraced house be an art form? Not according to Ruskin, Morris, and Unwin, who “condemned millions of houses with their countless items of craftsmanship belonging to the polite vernacular - if such a formulation is permissible” [p256]. Ultimately, such a question is meaningless today, as the industrialization of building led to a mechanical standardization, which is what we for the most part live with today. As with many other aspects of this book, it is an answer to the wrong question: We don’t read a book on terraced housing to worry about if it is art. Perhaps another book might address how local authorities attempted to bring beauty to the working-class house. But not this book.