A stone’s throw from my childhood home in Islington, north London, is a plain red and brown brick building called Canonbury Tower. For years, I cycled past it on the way to school, but didn’t take much notice of it. Then, one summer afternoon in 1986, when I was 14, I got a puncture and had to wheel my bike home. Walking past the tower, I noticed the window sills for the first time. Or, more precisely, the lack of them. Instead of the usual deep ledge, stepped back from the brickwork, the window was flush with the wall and there was barely any ledge at all.

Rootling through the school library, I discovered why these 16th-century windows looked like this. If a window sill is 4in deep or more, the house was built after the Great Fire of London – or, more precisely, after 1709, when legislation was passed to make buildings more fireproof. Earlier windows, such as the Canonbury ones, had been flush, or nearly flush, with the brick facade of the house. Flames licking the building had only to brush the wooden frame’s outside edge to consume the window, be drawn inside and set the entire place alight. Deeper window frames, stepped back from the wall, meant that only the bricks were scorched, so the interiors survived.

Suddenly, magically, London was transforming – no window sills before 1709, 4in-deep window sills after 1709. Buildings now showed me how the city grew up, layer by layer, the way you mark the height of your children on the kitchen wall. That day, I fell in love with the details of the ordinary British house. As the French painter Camille Pissarro said in 1893: “Happy are those who see beauty in modest spots where others see nothing. Everything is beautiful; the whole secret lies in knowing how to interpret it.”

I became obsessed with the terraced house, the greatest, and most overlooked, contribution to world architecture made by these islands. Know a little about it and you know something about most of the buildings that were put up in Britain between 1700 and 1830 – the boom years for the Georgian terrace. You’ll also know quite a lot about Victorian terraces, too, most of which copied the Georgian model. My own terraced house in Kentish Town, north London, built in 1870, is certainly based on the prototype.

The new terraces were remarkably adaptable in scale and cost for all classes. Here, unlike on the Continent, palaces weren’t feasible for anyone except the really grand. British developers liked to erect as many buildings as possible, as quickly as possible – and one-off palaces weren’t as remunerative as miles and miles of terraces. Our landowning structure, with large areas of cities owned by individuals, also meant the organised building of long strings of terraces was possible.

On the Continent, meanwhile. fragmented land ownership prevented such ambitious projects. The Parisian rich lived in freestanding hôtels, or private houses, with a high wall and courtyard separating them from the street. The British rich, by contrast, lived cheek by jowl in the terraces of Mayfair. So, we must yield to Italy and France at the smart end of the market, urban palaces and freestanding mansions. But when it comes to pretty, flexible housing that fits into any town – suitable for dukes and dustmen alike – terraced houses are a triumph of domestic architecture. They could be stretched to any length, from a row of four houses to a curving snake of buildings half a mile long.

Given their adaptability, it is extraordinary that such terraces exist nowhere else in the world except those places to which the British exported them. Extraordinary, too, that the quintessentially British terrace owes its origins to the palazzos built near Venice by the great Italian architect Andrea Palladio (150880).

First comes the rusticated ground floor – rustication is the word for the horizontal or chessboard grooves that are carved into the plaster on these lower floors. On Italian palaces, this look was supposed to give a “rustic” effect – of big, rough stones supporting the house. Next is the first floor, which the Italians considered the grand floor, or piano nobile. This was where they did all their entertaining, so it had the highest ceilings and tallest windows.

We copied this pattern for our terraced houses. If you live in one, your tallest windows will, in most cases, be on the first floor or, if you have a lower ground floor, on the raised ground floor. Your attic – where the Italians would have put the servants – has the lowest ceilings and the shortest windows, as in northern Italy in the 16th century.

I became obsessed, too, with how these terraced houses were built. Before you could put up a row of houses, you scraped away the earth until you got a literal “terrace” – a level, secure surface on which to place the foundations. This explains why terraced houses usually have back gardens lower than street level, but higher than the basement. The spoil from digging out the foundations was used to build up the road in front. So, if you dig down 4ft and use the spoil to build up the road, you end up with an 8ft drop from the road surface to the basement floor in the front – but a 4ft one at the back.

These three levels were a British modification to the Italian model. So, too, were our building materials: while Palladio used stone, in our stone-poor, earth-rich country, we used brick.

There was one more significant change to the prototype: because we get more rain than the Italians, we need steeper roofs. The terrace ended up as a row of Italian palaces with heavy-duty British roofs and chimneys on top.

Thus we developed our peculiarly beguiling Anglo-Italian hybrids – red, grey and yellow palazzos, sheltered by slate umbrellas. They swerve and dip in great long loops across the country, a stylish and internationally unique adornment to our towns and cities.

Terraced houses, however, are only one example of how often we have taken high-flown ideas and domesticated them. The chapter headings in my new book reflect this blend of the glamorous and the everyday – “Ginger Rogers goes to Arsenal – Art Deco, the Architecture of Entertainment”, or “Den and Ange Victorian, and Other Pub Styles”.

The Duke of Wellington’s Beer Act of 1830 – which removed all duty on beer – ushered in a wave of temples to drinking. Within a year, 31,000 new beer licences were issued. The pubs came in all sorts of exotic styles, from gothic revival to art nouveau. Most familiar of all, though is the robust Den-and-Ange 1850s classical.

The Queen Vic, in Albert Square, is a quintessential Victorian pub. The fake premises are accurate in every detail – a generously proportioned, three-bay building, taller and wider than the houses on the square. The first-floor windows have Gibbs surrounds, named for their inventor, the baroque architect James Gibbs.

On the ground floor, the Corinthian pilasters are connected by a subtle cornice with a string of dentils below. It skirts the full length of the pub, tying the facade neatly together around that awkward corner site. A second, deeper cornice runs along the top of the first floor beneath the roof – a nod to the pilasters that appeared on the first terraced houses, but were left off later ones.

You will see this combination of the grand and the domestic nowhere else in the world. As Anthony Trollope wrote in Barchester Towers in 1857: “We much question whether many noted travel-lers, men who have pitched their tents perhaps under Mount Sinai, are not still ignorant that there are glories in Wilt-shire, Dorsetshire and Somersetshire. We beg that they will go and see.”

A Lust for Window Sills – A Lover’s Guide to British Buildings from Portcullis to Pebble-Dash (Little, Brown £12.99) is available for £11.69 (including p&p) from The Sunday Times BooksFirst on 0870 165 8585

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