Back-to-back houses
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Back-to-back houses are a form of terraced house in which two houses share a rear wall (or in which the rear wall of a house directly abuts a factory or other building)..
Usually of low quality (sometimes with only two rooms, one on each floor) and high density, they were built for working class people and because three of the four walls of the house were shared with other buildings and therefore contained no doors or windows, back-to-back houses were notoriously ill-lit and poorly ventilated and sanitation was of a poor standard.
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[edit] History
These had become common in Victorian English inner city areas, such as Leeds, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Bradford, Nottingham and Birmingham. In Leeds, this style of terrace continued to be built right up until the 1930s when people decided that houses should be of a higher quality.
The advent of council housing after the First World War resulted in councils organising programmes of slum clearances which were all part of post-war redevelopment programmes. These procedures saw mass demolition of back-to-back houses begin in the 1920s, and by the 1970s the vast majority of back-to-back houses in Britain had been cleared.
Many people living in back to backs have often compared it to living in a cave.
[edit] Blind-backs
Back-to-back properties can also be known as blind-backs particularly when built up against factory walls, or occasionally as a terrace of houses standing on its own (from the end elevation this looks like a terrace that had been sliced in half and then one half demolished).
[edit] Other Forms of Back-to-backs
Other forms of back-to-back housing include Tyneside flats, tenements, courts, tunnel-backs and cluster houses
[edit] Usage
In recent years the term "back-to-back" has become a general catch-all term applied (erroneously) by the media to "through" terraced houses, the backs of which face each other but are separated by an alleyway, and are thus not contiguous like a true back-to-back.
