Why were terraces built with the communal access between the house and garden?

[MotionActivatedDog]

I’ve lived in a house like this and there are lots were I live. All originally council built properties. I never understood why the shared access was between the houses and garden (diagram 1) instead of at the bottom of the garden. (Diagram 2)

For me having small children and a dog it was a nuisance as I couldn’t ever leave my back door open for them to potter in the garden. It also meant people were walking right past my kitchen window as we were eating dinner.

Does anyone know why they were built this way?

Not the same but I live in a ground floor maisonette and the upstairs have access to my garden to store their bins, I’ve had to block it off so they can’t access our garden luckily due to the layout it wasn’t a problem blocking off the area

I've also seen it between the houses (in pairs) with the upper floor covering the passage way.

Yes they still build houses like that here too.

@MotionActivatedDog

Because you could then take away household and garden refuse away without having to trek it through the house!

You can do that in the set up in diagram 2. I live in a terrace like diagram 2 right now.

My apologies, I am sure I typed more than that one line!

That's a really good question.
A lot of the village properties round here are like this, but they were built organically (if you see what I mean) over time, and I assume originally didn't have gardens as such, but a bit of growing / keeping livestock land, which it would make sense not to run straight up to the back door.

I looked at quite a few of those when I was house hunting, and many were lovely houses and gardens. But that intervening lane did put me off. I am typing this stood on my kitchen doorstep looking atmy garden - I would miss that immediate access.

So to me it does seem odd to actually design and build houses like that, although I have seen them around (also Yorkshire). I would assume it is coal/ refuse delivery / collection related, but like you can't see why that couldn't be provided in other ways.

yes the third bedroom of one house would be over front of passageway and the third bedroom of neighbours house over the back of passage
so alley at back of houses as often the bottom of your gaden would be bottom of the gardesn of houses in next street, also generally the kitchen /living room was at back of house so through alley and in back door the front room and front door was only used for best so they didn't want dirt from street traipsed through house neither did they want to walk all down the garden then up to the house
back when these were built living was more communal so mrs smith would have kept eye on mrs jones kids and they would nip next door for a cuppa without appointment or ringing the bell so it is highly unlikely having your neighbours walk past windows would have bothered them at all when houses built

There definitely was a lot more socialising with neighbours when I lived there than in other houses I lived in. I just assumed it was a friendly street but the alley certainly did make it a lot more likely to bump into a neighbour. And they all gave my DCs sweets and ice lollies when they went past on their bike.

Yeah it’s to do with coal. I lived in one growing up. We had the house and then an inside yard that my dad had covered over with Perspex and grew plants in and mum had lines up for the winter and then a wall with a door and the outside yard with a coal house and the outdoor washing line and bins and the garden was across the alley.

We didn’t have central heating until I was 11 or 12 so we had fires in all the rooms

sorry too many typos and lack of punctuation the heat is frizzling my brain

Lots of those in Sheffield. Often in terraces with a tunnel between two houses and the main door in the middle of the tunnel rather than at the front. I’m not sure why they did that, either- what you gain from not needing a long corridor inside from the front door to the back room, you lose in having to give up space for the outdoor corridor. And your front door is directly opposite your neighbour’s front door, so less private.

I lived in a house like that as a student. We always used the dark alley between the houses and then walked across the back of the neighbours to get to our back door as the front door led straight into the front room, no hallway, which was being used as a bedroom.

It did mean we chatted to our neighbours more than we might have done, but that the garden seemed very separate and not to belong to the house as such.

OP there are loads round here, usually where the houses were built for the families of miners near the pits. I've read that they were built this way to encourage social interaction between inhabitants of the street.If the gardens were attached to the houses without a path between them people couldn't all congregate in a public place to chat, they'd only be able to talk with immediate neighbours. Also, all the children in the terrace could play outside together on the paths. The paths meant that walking along them meant you could meet and talk to lots of people and this would encourage community spirit.

If they are Victorian then the garden would have been a working space and not a leisure space.

A plot for veg and probably a pig or some chickens. The alley would have been a place to put out rubbish and possibly even human waste. Everything had value, even your poo which was collected and sold to farmers for fertiliser. You definitely didn’t want to be dragging all that all the way to the end of a garden. Stick it out the back door and by morning it will be gone.

@ufucoffee

OP there are loads round here, usually where the houses were built for the families of miners near the pits. I've read that they were built this way to encourage social interaction between inhabitants of the street.If the gardens were attached to the houses without a path between them people couldn't all congregate in a public place to chat, they'd only be able to talk with immediate neighbours. Also, all the children in the terrace could play outside together on the paths. The paths meant that walking along them meant you could meet and talk to lots of people and this would encourage community spirit.

It certainly was true in the one I lived. Probably the friendliest street I’ve ever lived on. If the alley had been gated at each end I might have felt safer about letting DC potter.

Having read other replies, round here coal and other deliveries would have come to the back lane, coal was deposited into the coal bunker, fish and meat deliveries would also go in through the back yard.

The ones here seem to be all 1950/60ish built.

A lovely example of a sociable back alley and its value during lockdown.
www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/belfast-news/south-belfast-alley-completely-transformed-18428892

Rights of way can be moved. Even public rights of way can be moved. Near us a public right of way moved from the bottom of a large garden to the top of the large garden (so it went past a barn/path) instead of drifting through the paddock. This might be something different in legal terms. Is it private land that each house owns but grants a right of way/access across for the other houses ? or is it public ? In either event it can be moved. If its private (ie owned by the terraces), I would start a conversation about agreeing collectively to have the right of way moved to the bottom. Then legal papers can be drawn up to achieve this (or even relinquish/recind reciprocal rights). Find a local solicitor who would agree a fixed fee (for you all to share, if you did the leg work to save costs). It would be a long process as everyone would have to agree, BUT BUT BUT I suspect the reward would be a material increase in the value of each of your terraces (and increased rentability for landlords etc as its would be better family housing) Xx

My parents house is like this, built in the 60s but to the same design as houses built previously on the road in the late 20s. I think the main reason was for coal deliveries, as each house had a coal bunker next to the back door. I think the way people used their gardens was different back then, they were really more like allotments for growing food rather than a recreational space for relaxing in and for kids to play. Even when I was a kid in the 90s most people still only had low wire fences separating gardens. You could see all the way from one end of the street to the other through the gardens, which was useful for my mum who could just yell if I was down the road on a friend's garden!

[quote Scarby9]A lovely example of a sociable back alley and its value during lockdown.
www.belfastlive.co.uk/news/belfast-news/south-belfast-alley-completely-transformed-18428892[/quote]
Ours was a bit like that too @Scarby9. We had hanging baskets and plants and bistro sets and the garden fences were all low so you could see from one garden at the end of the row to the one at the bottom and wave at the neighbours the whole way down

The road behind my house is like this.

@Comefromaway

I've known a lot of terraced properties in my life and never seen that.

They are extremely common, I’ve lived all over the country and they are everywhere

I've lived in both kinds, one with a passageway at the bottom of the garden and one with a shared path. The ones with shared access are usually like that because they back on to other buildings or houses and there's no room for a private path at the end. If they didn't have the shared path people would have to take all sorts of rubbish and garden/ building materials through their houses.

I rented one like this years ago. Mowing the grass was problematic because it was too far from the house for the cord to reach

The ones with shared access are usually like that because they back on to other buildings or houses and there's no room for a private path at the end.

Well there would be room because the gardens wouldn’t be any bigger, just the same size but attached to the houses with path at the end instead of in between.