PROSPECTS #01 — A NEW KIND OF SUBURBIA
FEATURE
The origins of the Semi-D FROM JOHN SHAW’S Provost Road semis in Camden of 1844 and Richard Norman Shaw’s Bedford Park estate of 1877 (Figure 1), to those designed by Alison Brooks Architects and Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios as part of the Accordia development in Cambridge, the semi-detached house borrows from and shares its status with its neighbour. Around a third of the UK population chooses to live in a semidetached property, so this is a house type that seems to suit British taste.1 What makes it so popular? ‘The English all want to live in their own private little box with their own little bit of green. And underlying that, the feeling of privacy and the middle-class tendency to keep ourselves to ourselves … to go home, shut the door and pull up the drawbridge’, says Kate Fox in Watching the English (2005). In the depression of the 1920s, speculative builders created an alternative to the generously proportioned houses of the Edwardian era (around 84m2), at a time when average family sizes were decreasing – as was the affordability of servants. Many disdained the stifling repetitiveness – road upon endless road and cul-de-sac of pitchedroof monotony – of the new suburban estates for the aspiring lower and middle of the middle classes. In Outrage: On the Disfigurement of Town and Countryside (1959), Ian Nairn expressed his view that the semi-detached house and the suburbia it produced were ordinary at best, and at worst, substandard development produced by failures in planning to foster high-quality, characterful places; they were the face of speculative developers’ greed. Builders consequently became eager to stress the uniqueness of their estates as often as they could, and buyers wanted individuality, but also to be part of a community in which their dwelling did not set them apart. They were offered a wide range of styles, with Tudorbethan timber work, some with Art Deco leanings, and Modernist versions with names such as Sunspan and Suntrap. The eponymous Class 3 semi, as defined by Finn Jensen in Modernist Semis and Terraces in England (2016), came with or without gabled, M-shaped or flat roofs, or bay windows. Owners could personalise front doors 50
with paint, install stained glass to the hall window and hang a romantic name (Dunroamin) over the door. Ubiquitous and stylish Almost half of all homes built in the inter-war period (1.8 million) were semidetached,2 and soon the monotony of the pattern-book house was much criticised. The typology was highly successful mainly because the large plots it used meant solar access was much better than that of a terraced house, while its increment allowed it to flow over the undulating countryside that it was built on. The semi-d has become synonymous with UK suburban life. The type is enduringly popular with the working and middle classes. It is economical and flexible. It uses less land than detached houses and is cheaper to construct, primarily thanks to the sharing of a party wall. It provides easy access to rear gardens and most have a front garden producing a green street scene. Recently, these have been crazy-paved over to accommodate two or more cars. Some ethnic-minority communities have built bulk food stores or home offices in their long back gardens and flat-roof additions have been erected to create very large family rooms, or two to three new bedrooms in a new attic floor. In some cases, the three-bed, five-person semi has been reconstructed to become a six-bed, eleven-person house with twice the original 84m2 floor area. More than two-thirds of the Housing Manual pattern book published by the Department of Health in 1919 were semidetached typologies,3 but land prices and building regulations contributed to the decline of the semi-detached house in the 1960s and ’70s, as have changing structures of society with more of us now living alone. Yet British people have embraced the semi-d like those of no other European country – a so far unexplained and interesting cultural phenomenon. Anatomy Semi-detached houses originally gave the appearance of a larger house. Entrances were combined at the centre of the plan with hall-to-hall layouts providing acoustic separation between habitable rooms. Soon, however, halls and entrance were placed
Words by Neil Deely Co-founding Partner – Metropolitan Workshop
to the outside of the plan, as many owners and their wives (who were at home during the day), were content not to exchange pleasantries with their neighbours every time they used the front door.
making a resurgence. In 2016, 151,687 new properties were registered with the NHBC, with semi-detached houses rising from around 14,969 homes in 2008 to 38,999 homes in 2016, some 26% of registrations.4
The universal 1920s speculative semi-d comprised a hall and stair which led to the kitchen, off which a small larder was sometimes provided. Up a dog-leg staircase were two double bedrooms and a single bedroom, all entered from a short landing; a bathroom and separate WC (in later versions) with small side windows taking up the rear corner. The ground-floor parlour at the front was given a grand bay window. This room was for receiving guests, tending to a sick family member and for study. Front and rear gardens were fitted with sundials, rose beds and goldfish ponds, and sometimes the side passage was used to install a prefabricated garage.
Part of the reason for this is that the semidetached house, though more commonly associated with private ownership and speculative development, offers opportunities for creating ‘tenure-blindness’ – a better social mix of social, affordable and owner-occupied homes – in estate design that other typologies are unable to match. It offers greater opportunities for privacy and later adaption than the terrace.
What remains interesting is the extent to which this ‘prix fixe’ formula has been endlessly customised, in a way rarely possible with other house types. Neither architecturally designed, nor made acceptable by tradition, the type is now
Below, bottom: Figure 1: Woodstock Road, Bedford Park: Norman Shaw’s drawings.
Developers like this typology for the same reasons as ever; the semi-d has the advantage of providing access to the garden without going through the house, and it remains less land hungry than detached houses (beloved by housebuilders but which may only be 2 metres apart); work rooms can be built at the back of the garden; while the flank wall provides the opportunity to get light into the middle of the house, allow natural ventilation to bathrooms and easily incorporate car parking and/or garages.