The “two-up, two-down” terraced house I grew up in taught me that even the most unassuming property has potential. My childhood home in Barnsley, South Yorkshire, was one of millions of houses built for the workers who kept the wheels of the Industrial Revolution turning. My mother performed her own revolution on 32 Commercial Street. In the constant quest for more space, she knocked down the outside lavatory, added a kitchen extension, stuck a porch at the front, and one weekend persuaded my father and uncle to demolish an upstairs wall and swap over the bathroom and a bedroom. She and Paul Lees, group chief executive of the Adactus Housing Group in Lancashire, would get on, well, like a house on fire.

Lees, who grew up in his own two-up, two-down in Wigan, is pioneering a radical regeneration in the kind of districts where John Prescott’s Pathfinder demolition squads might be tempted to point their bulldozers — Nelson in Lancashire, Moss Side in Manchester and the Frenchwood area of Preston.

Adactus, which owns and manages more than 6,200 homes across 17 local authority areas in the North West, is buying up dilapidated old terraced houses and transforming them into modern homes for shared ownership or rent. This year Adactus will have 30 such properties, which have been dubbed “Tardis terraces”, on its books. These houses are worth £86,000 on average, but on a 50 per cent shared ownership basis householders pay only £43,000, plus a weekly rent of £33. On a purely rental basis, tenants pay about £55 a week. Occupants tend to be young singles and couples, but they also appeal to the older generation, as Lees points out: “Pensioners really like them. They’re used to the cramped, dark, old-fashioned terrace and are amazed when they step inside.”

Hilary Roberts, Adactus’s group finance director, who came up with the idea of “Tardis terraces”, says: “About five years ago we realised that the terraced house was no longer the house of choice for our clients. The loft-living thing was beginning to take off and we thought, why not see how we could translate it? We looked at what else we could do with a terraced house, and how we could best use it for a single person.”

The Tardis terraces really are out of this world. Lees showed me around one of the latest to be completed, in James Street, Frenchwood, Preston, which has Coronation Street cobbles and a pub and a hairdresser’s on the corner. In the house, downstairs the kitchen has been ripped out of the back and placed at the front, overlooking the street. Clever storage with sliding doors makes the most of every inch. The wall that divided the ground floor has gone. At the rear is a double-height living space. Patio doors open on to a neat yard with walls painted in white and bright pink, more Miami than a murky back lane in Lancashire.

Upstairs the transformation is even more amazing. Two poky bedrooms and a bathroom have been cleared to create one mezzanine bedroom with built-in storage and a remote-controlled Velux window in the opened-up loft. A shiny new bathroom boasts bath, shower and aqua-coloured mosaic tiles. The rooms are still not huge, but the feeling is light and airy. “Inside it looks as modern as one of those new flats in town, but it comes with all the benefits of a house,” says one Adactus resident, Laura Insley, 36, a civil servant in Preston. “I’ve got a garden and loads of storage space, things that you don’t get in a one-bed flat in the city centre.”

“It was in a very poor condition, this house,” says Lees as we admire the deep burgundy and blue walls. “No central heating, a very tight staircase as you came in. This was a dark front room, and a dark back room. No fitted kitchen or anything like that.” I can’t imagine how the neighbours didn’t end up in a heap of rubble, as most of the supporting walls of the house appear to have been removed. Lees explains that the project architects, Architects Britch in Manchester, support each renovated house with a steel cage that stays in situ.

Creating each house costs Adactus about £45,000 in renovation costs, plus the purchase price. The average price of a terraced house in this area of Preston is £75,373 (Land Registry figure), although Adactus buys at the bottom end. Even so, this is not a cheap option for creating affordable housing. However, it is, as Lees believes, a responsible one. “You couldn’t do what we’re doing to these houses everywhere, but there are hundreds of thousands of two-up, two-downs in the North that it would be a shame not to try. What’s great is that it works, and people like it. And it brings back to life buildings that would otherwise rot.”

Around the corner, Claire Shaw is moving in to a newly refurbished Adactus house that she will rent for £55 a week. Shaw, a fashion designer, says: “I liked the idea of the houses because they’re modern and light and spacious. I love the colours, especially the pink in the garden. The only thing I’m not too keen on is the green in the bathroom, and the window in the back wall in front of the mezzanine bedroom. I will need a very long ladder to get a blind up there.”

Shaw, who works from home, needs lots of space for her fabric, sewing machine and tailor’s dummy. “I’m going to have to cram all my work in — I really could have done with another room, to be honest, but never mind.”

Perhaps she should wait and see whether one of the group’s most ambitious plans, to link two houses together across the back lane with a glass footbridge to form one large property, makes it off the drawing board. It is a fanciful idea, but ideas like this could make the two-up, two-down not just a relic of the past, but the house of the future.

www.adactus-group.com, 01942 608715

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