Semi-detached housing is England’s most prevalent type of housing, representing around one-third (more than 7 million) of all dwellings today, with 1 million in rural villages and hamlets.
The inter-war period of the 1920s and 1930s was the boom era for this style of housing. The enormous building surge in the hinterland of the country’s towns and cities shaped what we often think of as archetypal suburbia.
However, the origins of the semi-detached house go back centuries. Here, we look at the story of its development from rural origins to the 21st century.
Early rural development: The 17th and 18th centuries
Most semi-detached houses (earlier known as double cottages or double houses) are constructed as a symmetrical pair with a common wall between them. Each house mirrors the other in plan, with space down the side to access the rear from the street.
Accommodating residents on either side, semi-detached houses entailed lower construction costs and could be built more quickly.
There is the occasional early reference to a handful of such properties in rural areas in England in the 17th century.
However, this type of dwelling was also built in small groups in rural England in the 1800s by landowners who viewed their workers’ old cottages as an eyesore and ordered them demolished and rebuilt.
Model villages: Late 18th century
One of the best-known examples was created by the Earl of Dorchester, Joseph Damer (1718 to 1798), who remodelled Milton Abbey in Dorset into a great house.
He pulled down the original medieval village before housing the estate’s agricultural workers in the newly built model village of Milton Abbas, with its 40 semi-detached thatched houses.
The cottages were each deliberately designed to look like one house with a single entrance, but up to 4 families shared each dwelling.
This single entrance design concept endured in certain locations across England for the next couple of hundred years.
Semi-detached housing in London: 18th and 19th centuries
The Industrial Revolution transformed Britain. The population increased from 1 million in 1800 to nearly 6 million over the next 100 years.
By the 1880s, nearly 70% of the population lived in urban areas. This was the result of rural workers moving to towns and cities in search of factory jobs and other work. Overcrowding and poverty were rife.
City centres in Britain had traditionally housed both the prosperous and the working classes, but the Industrial Revolution hugely expanded a middle class with disposable income.
These city traders, bankers, shipping magnates, merchants and industrialists now wanted to move out of city centres and flaunt their wealth in fashionable new suburbs, setting in motion the future development of semi-detached housing in towns and cities, with the capital leading the way.
The Paragon in Blackheath, London, was one such desirable development, constructed speculatively for the newly wealthy middle classes.
It featured 7 enormous houses in a crescent, each linked by a single-storey colonnade. Although the houses appeared detached, they were, in fact, semi-detached, with 2 dwellings per house. The entrances were within the colonnades.
London’s first planned suburban estates: Early 19th century
The design of the Eyre Estate originated at the end of the 18th century on 500 acres of open fields bought earlier in the century by wine merchant Henry Samuel Eyre.
The estate, constructed in the early 19th century, is an early example of a large, planned London suburb, although almost none of the plans were realised as initially conceived.
Architect John Shaw (1776 to 1832) included a proposal for pairs of semi-detached dwellings, a novelty at the time, including Italianate and Gothic-style villas.
In the 1820s, architect John Nash (1752 to 1835) constructed a small group of houses, Park Village East and Park Village West, near Regent’s Park in London.
Most were designed as semi-detached dwellings, but appeared like a single house. These were picturesque, stuccoed, mostly Italianate villas for the people who wanted social recognition, privacy, and the leafy illusion of the countryside.
Both the Park East and Park West Villages and the Eyre Estate heralded the increasing acceptance of semi-detached dwellings by the middle class, which percolated through society in the following decades.
Semi-detached housing in the early to mid-Victorian era
The Victorian era (1837 to 1901) saw a huge growth of the middle classes.
The growth of the middle classes was paralleled by a matching boom in house building, including many terraced housing estates for the growing industrial workforce. Renting for all levels of society continued to be the norm.
Affluent suburbs, which form settlements with a clear relationship with a nearby town or city but with their own distinctive character, started to develop for wealthier families who wanted to move away from urban life into the countryside.
As a result, semi-detached housing became a desired housing type.
Architectural pattern books
Much of the new housing across the country was built without architects, using architectural pattern books instead.
These building ‘bibles’ were first published in the 18th century and surged in the following century. Such books allowed for the sharing of designs and sources of inspiration for owners and builders.
There was limited planning control at this time. However, from the mid-19th century, following fatal cholera outbreaks, various public health and other acts were passed which allowed for building byelaws to be adopted requiring the proper provision of space, light and sanitation for new houses.
This represented an enormous advance in living conditions for the working and lower-middle classes.
Architectural style in the mid to late Victorian era
By the mid-19th century, the Victorian imagination was in thrall to medieval Gothic ecclesiastical architecture and romantic literature, such as Walter Scott’s novels.
Gothic Revival architecture became fashionable, embodied by the rebuilt Houses of Parliament, designed by British architect Charles Barry, and by new rail stations such as St Pancras in London.
The Gothic Revival style was soon embraced by Victorian speculative builders of domestic housing who, across the era, also freely borrowed from an eclectic range of other architectural styles, including Italianate, Tudor and vernacular.
From around the middle of the 19th century, the middle classes who could not afford a detached house but wanted to differentiate themselves from what they considered socially inferior urban terraces, embraced the semi-detached in all its styles, if it was flamboyant and in an acceptable location.
Alongside this, the expansion of public transport and the building of new roads meant more people could live further away from home and commute to work, resulting in a further development of the suburbs and a proliferation of semi-detached housing.
Model industrial villages
While over half the population in the latter 19th century were still living in the cramped slum terraces and tenements of towns and cities, there were also philanthropic industrialists keen to improve their workers’ lives.
Many created model villages, offering a healthy, pleasant environment to increase productivity and cement loyalty to the firm.
There are several outstanding examples of such paternalism, including the Bournville model village, built mainly in Arts and Crafts style. This was overseen from 1900 by a trust established by the Quaker George Cadbury, the chocolate manufacturer and social reformer, although occupation wasn’t limited to the factory workers.
Semi-detached housing in the early 20th century
The Garden City Movement
Model villages and other housing reform initiatives, as well as self-help schemes like co-partnership, profoundly influenced the Garden City Movement, founded by Ebenezer Howard (1850 to 1928) as a reaction against the ongoing social problems of towns and cities.
Garden Cities, such as Letchworth (begun in 1903) and Welwyn Garden City (begun in 1919), both in Hertfordshire, were intended to reverse the countryside’s depopulation. They offered self-contained suburbs in a countryside setting that included jobs in industry and agriculture and new homes, many of which were semi-detached.
The Garden City Movement and its adjunct, the garden suburb, which got underway at Hampstead in 1907, strongly influenced the design and planning of suburbs.
The Inter-War period (1919 to 1939): The semi-detached housing boom years
The greatest concentrations of semi-detached housing in England were built in the suburbs between the First and Second World Wars. Today, this house style is synonymous with suburbia for most people.
The years following the First World War (1914 to 1919) were marked by an enormous shortage, estimated as being around 600,000 homes in 1918.
The housing crisis, as well as demographic and societal changes, spawned numerous parliamentary acts, recommendations and reports. The Tudor Walters Report (1918) was highly influential in terms of recommendations for suburban house building, while the government’s Housing Manual (1919) provided house plans, two-thirds of which were for semi-detached housing.
Private developers built speculative estates of predominantly semi-detached homes in the suburbs of virtually every English town and city, in styles ranging from the popular and aspirational ‘Tudorbethan’, to neo-Georgian, Art Deco, flat-roofed Modern and neo-vernacular.
New state-aided council housing boomed because, although previously permitted by government legislation under the Housing, Town Planning Act 1919, it became a duty for local authorities.
The middle classes, swollen in number by white-collar workers, and with cheap loans offered by the growing number of building societies, were now often able to buy their own semi-detached homes and commute from the suburbs to their urban workplaces.
For most people, including both the middle class and increasingly the working class, the semi-detached house with its large garden, privet hedges and leafiness giving a feeling of countryside, was now the most popular and aspirational residence.
Housing from the 1950s to the early 21st century
Britain suffered an acute housing shortage following the Second World War (1939 to 1945). Half a million homes were destroyed by aerial bombardment, and hundreds of thousands of other homes were damaged.
The provision of new council housing was a top priority in addressing the crisis. 2.5 million houses and flats were built across the country in the 10 years from 1946, often planned as neighbourhoods embracing new ideas of how people should live. Three-quarters were built by local authorities.
Over 150,000 prefabricated homes were constructed, as well as over 22 government-funded New Towns, including Harlow and Basildon. Stevenage was the first to be built from 1946, and Milton Keynes was the last from 1967, giving homes to around 2 million people.
Situated beyond the Green Belt, New Towns offered employment opportunities and brand-new, well-built homes, many of which were semi-detached.
Across the country, semi-detached housing remained a dominant type and the most common dwelling until the 1960s, when it started to decline as a primary building style in favour of more mixed housing solutions.
Suburban developments in the modern era, for example, now often centre on small estates, including on the fringes of towns and villages, with a mix of semi-detached and detached housing and short terraces.
Cities feature modern high-rise private apartment blocks, while local authorities and housing associations are building large numbers of social housing flats, maisonettes and houses.
Yet, despite this, as government statistics show, semi-detached housing is still the most prevalent type of housing today, representing around one-third of all homes in England.
Today, architects continue to experiment with a form that has maintained its popularity and usefulness in suburban development across the country.
Written by Nicky Hughes
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Further reading
- How We Built Suburbia: The Development of England’s Suburbs
- England’s Suburbs 1820-2020 by Joanna Smith and Matthew Whitfield
- From Factory to Fireside: 6 Marvellous Model Villages
- In Suburbia: Cottage Exhibitions
- A Brief History of Prefabs
- The History of Council Housing: 6 Responses to the 1919 Addison Act
In addition to Tudorbethan, many inter war semi-detached estates had a mixture of Tudorbethan and Moderne semi-detached houses, the Moderne style used rendered elevations, and flat or hipped roofs covered in green, blue or yellow glazed clay pantiles. Windows were either timber or Crittal steel in horizontal emphasis, often with fixed timber shutters decorated with geometrical designs. The different styles lent variety to what would otherwise tend to the monotonous.
Often with Crittall ‘Sunseeker’ windows which were curved on plan.
An early example of shuttered concrete construction, dating back to 1852, can be found in a pair of semi-detached houses (Historic England Grade: II
List Entry Number: 1392610; historicengland.org.uk/listing/the-list/list-entry/1392610) at East Cowes on the Isle of Wight just a stone’s throw from the Prince Of Wales Lodge and entrance of the more famous Osborne House of the same era.
Another driver for building a pair of semi-detached houses – certainly in the mid to late Victorian period – was to live in one and let the other out for the income. Or it might be to house members of the same family. In both cases there was the economy of scale mentioned above, as well control over who you had as a neighbour.