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.
Contents |
These had become common in Victorian English inner city areas, such as Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Salford, Liverpool, Bradford and Nottingham. 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.
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).
Other forms of back-to-back housing include tenements, courts, tunnel-backs and cluster houses usually there was no internal staircase, access to the upper bedroom was by the way of a 'fixed' wall ladder leading through an aperture in the ceiling
In recent years the term "back-to-back" has become a general catch-all term 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.
