Back-to-back houses

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Birmingham Back-to-Backs, now preserved, showing the shop fronts and the entrance to the courtyard

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 low standard.

History

Back-to-backs in Bankfield Road, Leeds, 2005

Houses of this type had become common in Victorian English inner city areas, such as those of Birmingham, Bradford, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester and Salford, and Nottingham. In Leeds, this style of terrace continued to be built right up until 1937 when it was decided that houses should be of a higher quality.^[1]

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 the beginning of mass demolition of back-to-back houses in the 1920s. The process started again in the 1950s and continued through the 1960s,^[2] and by the 1970s the vast majority of back-to-back houses in England had been cleared.^{[citation needed]}

Terminology

Typical across-street washing line arrangement with pulley operated from street level in Armley, Leeds, 2004

It has become common for the term "back-to-back" to be applied erroneously 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.

Back-to-back houses 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).^{[clarification needed]}

Other forms of back-to-back housing include tenements, courts, tunnel-backs and cluster houses. Usually there was no internal staircase and access to the upper bedroom was by the way of a 'fixed' wall ladder leading through an aperture in the ceiling.^{[citation needed]}

See also

• Birmingham Back to Backs

References

Further reading

• Beresford, M. W. (1984) "The back-to-back house in Leeds, 1787-1939", in: Beresford, M. W. Time and Place: collected essays; ch. 25. London: Hambledon Press ISBN 0907628397
• Engels, Friedrich (1845) Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England. Leipzig: O. Wigand (German)
• Engels, Friedrich. "The Condition of the Working-Class in England in 1844 with a Preface written in 1892". Project Gutenberg. http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/17306. 
  • Contents
    • Preface
    • Introduction
    • Great towns
    • Competition
    • Irish immigration
    • Results
    • Single branches of industry--Factory hands
    • The remaining branches of industry
    • Labour movements
    • The mining proletariat
    • The agricultural proletariat
    • Attitude of bourgeoisie towards the proletariat
    • Translators note
    • Index

External links

• Leeds aerial view
• Preserved Birmingham back-to-back houses
• Article on Bradford back-to-back houses
• Back-to-back housing in Reading