Victorian Terrace - replace railings at the front of house?

[Littleredflowers]

I need your help!

I have a Victorian terraced house. We are trying to sort out the front of the house; (including replacing upvc front door with a wooden one, tiling up to the front door) and we need to rebuild the small wall at the front of the house. At the moment it is five courses with a flat top.

Do we

a) rebuild the 5 courses and replace the top with curved bricks (so that it matches the immediate neighbours and most of the other walls on the road)

b) rebuild the 5 courses, replace the top with curved bricks and put railings on top (which is what I believe were there originally)

c) rebuild 3 courses and add taller railings

Our immediate neighbours don't have railings, if we add some, will ours make our house stand out too much and make it look a bit odd in the rest of road? (Some of the houses further down the road do have them)

I want to try and bring back some of the features that the house would have had when it was built but I don't want to get it wrong.

For example, there seem to be so many different tile patterns up to the front door, did they vary from town to town? Or did different craftsmen have their signature pattern? How would I find out what would be typical? I need a history lesson!

Can you help?

TIA

With the fence, I'd do what you like best and can afford providing that it is mildly sympathetic to the house and neighbourhood (I'd favour some sort of railing so that I could chain my bike up easily but that's just me). Regarding the tiles, do any of your neighbours still have their original tiles to give you a steer? As far as I can tell, the Minton very colourful tiles tend to be on less grand houses; the more prestigious homes had small black and white chequerboard (this is just my observation, not historical fact). If there are no precedents on your street, go for the type that you like best.

Thanks lalalonglegs, I will have a nosy around the neighbouring streets and try and get some inspiration. I just don't want to make a glaring mistake!

Railings in a street of no railings can look very odd yes.

It depends what you like though.

I'd be tempted to restore to as original as possible. It sounds lovely

We have a Victorian terrace, our wall was rebuilt in the 80s / 90s with dark brown brick and capped with stones. Several.other houses have railings and it looks lovely, really smart. When we redo the wall we will put the railings back, as they really suit the house (unlike ndn who is installing white concrete balustrades!).

We have small black and white tiles in our storm porch but concrete on the path, it looks like they went all the way down to the step (given a house in an adjoining road) in a chequerboard pattern, with black tiles around the edge.

Also we have twisted rope edging along the front garden edges, all the houses have them along here and it seems to be an original feature too.

Thanks so much.

Yikes, white concrete balustrades! I am hoping that our railings won't be as much of a statement as those!

We have some terracotta coloured tiles which were dug up from the back of the house when we had some building work done. We think we'd aim to use those for the path, and add some black ones to make a chequerboard pattern. Your edging tiles sound lovely, I might try and find some of those. And I love the small black and white patterns, really stylish.

Our builder has some of the original twisted rope edging so he would use that too.