Despite the current boom for architects, Government statistics suggest that the UK is still building only 180,000 houses a year. This is simply not enough to deal with its projections for growth in the number of households. In a recently published Housing Green Paper: Homes for the future: more affordable, more sustainable, the Government proposes to increase this figure to 240,000 a year. For my generation of architects, this escalation promises to play a significant part in our future and not only in relation to the bottom line, which one might imagine to be the only force determining the output of many practices. For the first time in at least a generation it feels as if we might, as a profession, have the opportunity to positively contribute to the welfare of the country, en masse, through the large scale transformation of its housing stock. However, there also seems a very significant danger that we will, instead, simply end up repeating or even exceeding the mistakes of the past.

Even if one disregards the dubious contribution which much new housing makes to our towns and cities; it is clear that the recent focus on the construction of high density, small scale apartments within existing urban centres does not reflect the diversity of housing need. In our peripheral vision stands the family house and beyond that suburbia. It is to these conditions, too long ignored by architects, that we need to turn our attention.

With 95% of the UK’s unbuilt land under some measure of protection, new housing is being forced to migrate from the idyll of the garden suburb. Instead, it increasingly stands densely clustered on marshland, along motorway corridors or in an ex industrial brown-field. Of course, before suburbs became conceived of as gardens, the housing on the peripheries of our large industrial conurbations was often extremely dense. Tower Hamlets, on London’s Eastern edge had for example, twice the population 100 years ago that it does today. 19th Century maps illustrate vast fields of housing laid out in seemingly endless rows of terraced houses. Today, the increasing pressure on available land is beginning to point us back in the direction of this historical model.rumours.

Beyond a few isolated examples, J.J.P. Oud’s terrace at the Weissenhof Seidlung in Stuttgart for example, the small scale terraced house condition was largely overlooked by modernism and lay relatively dormant, in terms of its development as a type, throughout much of the Twentieth Century. This is perhaps precisely because of its association with such slums of industrialisation as those in the East End of London. In Britain, the 1909 Housing and Town Planning Act had in fact outlawed back-to-back terraced housing, declaring such accommodation unfit for human habitation.

London’s ever expanding waistline has meant that Tower Hamlets has gradually moved from periphery to centre and much of that 19th Century terraced housing was demolished in post war slum clearance programmes. A recent small infill terrace of three houses within the Borough, by Stephen Taylor Architects, nonetheless offers an interesting and perhaps extreme response to current shift in attitudes to density. In a number of recent projects Taylor, like many of his contemporaries, has looked back past modernity to Georgian precedents for inspiration and indeed the Chance Street project bears a marked affinity with those illustrated in Peter Guillery’s excellent survey of ‘The small house in Eighteenth Century London’.

A flat brick frontage, punctured by generous windows, presents itself to the street, with metal gates against the pavement opening up to a relatively large threshold and a ground floor room of flexible use. This belies the fact that the party walls stand at only 3.8m centres and that the outside space at the rear is the vertical shaft of a lightwell. In the face of such restriction these houses, in the hands of a skilful architect, still manage to offer attractive, well designed, flexible interior spaces and even an informal amenity space on the roof. Such a degree of density should however be considered dangerous as a model

Mass housing typologies tend to reflect the legislative, economic and, one would hope, social demands of their time. Given the long standing desire to escape from the terrace and the inner city to the freestanding house in its own garden plot, there seems a danger that this return to type is counter to the aspirations of the public. Across northern cities such as Manchester and its surrounding conurbation, new estate developments by volume house builders, of a kind usually derided by architects, remain popular. This is in stark counterpoint to the swathes of decaying terraces in neighbouring HMR (Housing Market Regeneration) areas. There are of course many other issues at work here, but what generally characterises the latter in physical terms is the uniformity and homogeneity of the housing stock; basically, long lines of two up, two down’s set to the back of pavement on gridded streets. Although I must admit to an aesthetic affinity with those strong hard geometries and surfaces of glimmering Accrington brick, which I recall from my own childhood, they have not endured in the affections of house buyers.

In 2006 mae architects, a young practice who have concentrated on issues of housing and housing policy, undertook a study on such an area, Whitefields in Nelson, Lancashire - responding to a controversial proposal for mass demolition. Mae’s project included some selective demolition but primarily focused on adjustments to the existing houses. They suggested longitudinal and transverse conversions, creating more varied accommodation. Extensions to the rear contained the more highly serviced elements required by modern domesticity and offered private amenity spaces above. The project is interesting in that reassesses and adapts, rather than simply rejects an unloved, but prevalent typology. This is an approach too often dismissed in the tabula rasa economics of modern housebuilding. Interestingly, Urban Splash’s recent Chimney Pot Park development in Salford employs just such a model in relation to existing terraces, even if the retention of the original houses does not appear to go far beyond the façade.

Other historic examples of terraces have fared far better in the public consciousness The aforementioned Georgian example being, in particular, a much sought after type. Whatever the period and however large the house though, whether it be a Nash terrace on Regents Park or workers housing in the East End, the strength of the typology is derived from repetition rather than variegation; informing a collective urbanism where the identity and scale of individual homes was suppressed in relation to that of the street, neighbourhood or city. Jonathan Sergison and Stephen Bates of Sergison Bates, a practice which has in recent years produced a number of interesting prototypes and variations on contemporary terraced housing suggested, in a recent discussion on the subject, that this is a conception that sits uneasily in relation to a cultural increasingly built around expressions of individuality.

At this juncture some may point to examples such as West Eight’s widely praised 1996 Borneo Sporenburg in Amsterdam, as mediating between these concerns. It is certainly a project with strong formal and spatial qualities and has spawned at least one recent imitator in this year’s Urban Splash ‘Tutti Frutti’ Housing Competition. However its strength might be said to reside in its distinctiveness, which would make it appear an inappropriate precedent for mass housing. Simply, it does not provide the repeatable, formal, material and economic robustness of the Georgian and Victorian pattern book types, which seem to have offered quite ordinary architects and even jobbing builders the means to construct quickly, at a large scale and with reasonable workmanship and materials. At its best, such housing has the inate dignity of receding; offering a well mannered background to both the public and the intimate, domestic lives of our cities. This is a fundamental quality which, with all our contemporary checks and safeguards, codes and regulations, we appear to find difficult to match.

It is tempting to ask why we cannot simply reiterate a successful prototype, such as the Georgian terraced street; but if the terrace has stood still at a cultural level, it is now undergoing a process of rapid transformation at the level of legislation. Frustratingly, this is a process where, as Architects, we largely appear to be occupying the role of passive recipients, making it work, rather than setting the agenda. Nonetheless, from a plethora of codes, new patterns are emerging: parking; refuse and recycling; means of escape and access; security; acoustic separation; relationships to private external amenity space; and of course issues of energy use and sustainable construction are all shifting the typology.

A current project in my own office, for a mix of terraced house conditions within a much larger suburban masterplan, illustrates our own emerging awareness of this. In line with received good urban design practice, the project places parking within the curtilage of the property, in order to limit the need for on-street parking down to visitors. The adoption of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s  Lifetime Homes standards thus requires a 3.3m wide covered parking space with connection to the front door. The desire to keep a continuous street line brings these into the volume of the building, creating very wide, perforated frontages. A habitable room on the ground floor facing the street is required under Secured by Design; whilst Lifetime Homes require a entry level w.c., large enough to accept a shower. The consequence of all these factors is that the ground floor is much larger than the upper floors, leading to an L shape in both plan and section. Given this, it came as little surprise, when Alex Ely partner in mae, writing in a recent AJ piece on the Housing Design Awards, suggested that “Family housing of the early part of the 21st century may come to be characterised by the courtyard or what could be termed the L house.”

Experience gained of working with these issues, is teaching us to think critically in relation to codes. A good example of this is in relation to the Lifetime Homes requirements for disability access. This calls for an ambulant disabled stair, capable of accepting a stairlift, the aforementioned w.c. and shower and a position for a future lift. Although the issue from which these requirements are derived is a fundamentally important one, it is worth considering whether all elements of this provision are simultaneously necessary, as the code requires. The average household in the UK moves once every seven years - hardly a lifetime and it may be that, as a society, we should equally be trying to ensure that a diversity of property types are available, rather than relying on a single, complex model. My own grandmother has both a stairlift and downstairs facilities but, in the end, would rather have the opportunity to move to a bungalow – unfortunately a scarce commodity in the area where she lives.

As a practice, our attitude has been to favour those elements which ‘civilise’ the house. The 900mm wide, shallow stair becomes a generous moment in a tight plan, whereas the lift would destroy the volume of the room. The large downstairs sanitary facilities are designed to double as a utility space…and so on. Another concern stemming from the provision of such amenities is that their impingement upon overall space requirements is not accounted for by the agents who ‘advise’ clients. New UK housing boasts the highest number of rooms per dwelling of any country in Europe but simultaneously offers the smallest floor areas – larger stairs and the proliferation of sanitaryware only exacerbates that problem. Paradoxically the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s research into housing need also shows that “…when faced with trade-offs consumers show that they strongly prefer additional bedrooms or larger rooms sizes to additional bathrooms. Preferences, quality and choice in new-build housing”. Of course sizes in plan predominate in such discussions but we should not forget volume, the height of the rooms being one of the other great attractions of older housing. Within one current project, we are manipulating the section to allow the principal room of each type to have a 3m rather than 2.4m ceiling height. It remains to be seen whether this will make it through the ‘value engineering’ process. Sergison Bates recall, in relation to their semi detached houses in Stevenage, that it was the bedrooms with their sloping ceilings into the pitch, that the purchasers enjoyed the most. Ironically, these were almost lost on the basis of the extra triangle of plasterboard needed for the walls.

Thinking about this developing terrace typology as a whole, beyond the individual dwelling, raises other issues. The width of the plan and the need to meet density requirements inevitably places pressure on the depth of the plot. This can result in a reduced length of rear garden, minimal overlooking distances and small buffer spaces in front of the houses, against relatively narrow streets. These frontages have, in any case, to be small - so there is no chance of the future occupant paving over and parking a car on them. Collectively, these proximities, along with the need for level access under part M, mean that clever design is needed to offer required levels of privacy, something a volume house builder cannot automatically be expected to engage with. More fundamentally however, they offer a vision for suburbia, which has a distinctly urban feel.

We may breath a collective sigh of relief that urban design guidance from CABE and others has been instrumental in undermining planning authorities insistence on minimum overlooking distances. These have often denied the opportunity for density and for sensible relationships to be made to a historic grain. However, we now appear to be in freefall and serious research on what is, in reality, acceptable is necessary if we are not to simply arrive back in the Nineteenth Century, where this article began.

If the space between us all is diminishing then what occupies it also comes under threat. In contrast to strictly defined internal requirements, where Scheme Development Standards (SDS) can tell you all the requirements for a two person room, down to the size of the dressing table; no legislation or Local Authority guidance defines the provision of amenity and garden spaces. Should gardens also be planned and legislated for, given the importance of exterior space to our contemporary patterns of living and their obvious relation to pressing social issues such as lack of play space and obesity amongst children? Currently, they often appear to be the areas which feel the squeeze of other factors. If the redefined terrace is going to endure as a successful and popular type, it needs to accommodate the desires of those who will inhabit it.

These are potentially exciting times for architects and our input as a profession is essential if the concerns and opportunities alluded to here are to be successfully addressed. I have not even touched upon the far more widely discussed issues of energy conservation and emissions, material sourcing and construction methods – all equally essential considerations which will have similarly transformative effects on our future homes. However, the rush to build three million of them places a huge burden of responsibility on architects to continue to be vigilant and critical, if we are not to be simply the instruments by which house builders and developers extract short term gain. As a profession we were vilified for decades over the mistakes made in the provision of housing after the war and we cannot afford to make them again. Good design will be fundamental in refining and resolving the relationships between these things, if it is not only predicated only upon looking different enough to appear in the pages of journals such as this one. After the dogma of modernism and the many irrelevancies of post-modernity, we have a moment of opportunity to reflect upon how strong historically successful models, of which terraced housing is a primary example, may be re-invigorated and redefined. Whether we are successful or not, our efforts will, nonetheless, shape and define our settlements, our social relationships and the views across our countryside for decades to come. We should all bear this in mind.