I AM sitting on my patio smelling the roses and sipping a glass of wine on a balmy summer evening, listening to blackbirds singing and the happy voices of my neighbours’ children playing on their climbing frame. On the street there are picket fences, pastel façades and shiny BMWs and 4x4s. Outside the neighbourhood gastropub people are quaffing designer beer and hoping to catch a glimpse of the local celebrities, who include Jeremy Vine of Radio 2 and Paul Cook of the Sex Pistols. On the corners there are smart cafés, an organic deli, a master butcher and a newsagent that delivers papers, not to mention a handful of estate agents’ offices.

Yes, I am fortunate enough to live in an extremely nice neighbourhood. So nice that most of the rented homes on this street are occupied by canny young professional couples patiently waiting for their dream home to come on the market. In this enclave of Victorian terraces in Hammersmith, West London, the price for a house starts at about £500,000. If you moved that extra mile towards Chelsea, you would not have much change out of £1 million for a four-bed Victorian terraced house.

“People just love them,” says the estate agent Wendy Wilmot, of Angela Stanley & Co. “They have a nice homely quality. There is a sense of community in these streets and a feeling of stability because you’ve usually got a harmonious mix of long-term council tenants, owner-occupiers and people renting. And the houses are a perfect size for a couple or a small family.” Which makes it hard to see the logic in the recent announcement from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister that thousands of Victorian terraced houses in the North of England are to be demolished. Bizarrely, they are doomed under the Pathfinder scheme, which is supposed to regenerate areas where the housing market has collapsed. There is £500 million available for new homes in Pathfinder areas, so local authorities will knock down sound Victorian houses to replace them with new-build homes. For the new occupiers, a new home will mean they have been pushed down a rung on the property ladder. “People have never liked modern,” says Wilmot. “There is tremendous resistance to new townhouses; people will not touch them.”

Most Victorian terraces were built in a golden age of high-quality brick stocks and sound craftsmanship. They were intended for the working-class families who swelled the new cities in the Industrial Age. Each area has its own history: in Chiswick, the enclave now called “Little Chelsea” was built for the labourers at Kew Gardens. In Battersea, Brixton and Clapham, railway workers moved in. In Bristol and Ports mouth, they were homes for seamen. In Coventry, it was steel workers. English Heritage cites Nelson in Lancashire as a perfect example, an instant community built for cotton-mill workers.

By the mid-1940s terraced cottages were known as “back-to-backs” and were despised as slums. Postwar planners demolished them wholesale and replaced them with Le Corbusier-style tower blocks. It was a disastrous move because established communities were shattered and the new flats nurtured misery, alienation and crime. Now the postwar skyscrapers are coming down, to be replaced with low-rise medium-density homes.

Victorian terraces, however, are already sound, low-rise, medium-density housing, both cheap and easy to restore. A recent edition of Tonight With Trevor MacDonald found that a back-to-back house can be rescued for only 20 per cent more than the cost of demolition. English Heritage estimates that the cost of maintaining a Victorian terraced house will be 40 per cent to 60 per cent less than replacing it with a new home.

Once renovated, they make immensely popular homes, and seem to invite innovation; many a young architect has customised their Victorian home. “They are inherently flexible,” says the architect Deborah Saunt, of DSDHA, who lives in her Battersea house with her partner, their two children, and an au pair. She moved in 15 years ago as a student. “They are modest structures, laid out in such a simple fashion that they are a loose fit and it’s easy to change the function of rooms.” Deborah’s own conversion features a gleaming steel conservatory-style eat-in kitchen replacing what were originally the scullery, coal hole and outside lavatory.

The terraces also seem to induce neighbourliness while still offering privacy. Saunt explains: “They engender a sense of community because you can look into each other’s gardens but at the same time the space is very clearly defined. There are no anonymous shared spaces, as there are in balcony-access flats.”

The battle lines for our back-to-backs are now being drawn. English Heritage is on their side, albeit a little cautiously. Earlier this year Simon Thurley, its chief executive, said: “It is important that we learn from the past and do not unnecessarily sweep away places with real value that have the potential for imaginative renewal.”

In Liverpool, where 20,000 houses, including the one in which Ringo Starr was born, are under threat, the Merseyside Civic Society says that demolition should be only a last resort. The inherent snobbery and injustice of insisting that poor people should live in modern homes of limited market value while rich people enjoy period homes of seemingly limitless worth is increasingly obvious. Coronation Street may yet be reborn as another Little Chelsea.

www.dsdha.co.uk 020-7703 3555

www.angelastanley.co.uk 020-7352 9556

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