One of three adjacent terraces each of eight houses along this road
A bookend terrace is a short row of terraced houses, where the two end houses of the terrace are larger than the others. This gives the visual effect of bookends.
In architecture and city planning, a terrace or terrace house (UK) or townhouse (US) is a form of medium-density housing that originated in Europe in the 16th century, whereby a row of attached dwellings share side walls. They are also known in some areas as row houses.
Common in libraries, bookstores, and homes, the bookend is an object tall, sturdy, and heavy enough, when placed at either end of a row of upright books, to support or buttress them. Heavy bookends—made of wood, bronze, marble, and even large geodes—have been used for centuries; the simple sheetmetal bookend uses the weight of the books standing on its foot to clamp the bookend's tall brace against the last book's back; in libraries, simple metal brackets are often used to support the end of a row of books. Elaborate and decorative bookends are common as elements in home decor.
Bookend terraces in Britain first appeared in the late-Georgian period, as the combination of neo-classical architecture and the newly built terraces in the expanding cities. Typical terraces were identical throughout, but high-status developments, where space and budget permitted, might have a central protrusion to their facade or even a portico added as a feature. [1] For prices between these ranges, the bookend terrace was a means to produce the symmetrical but non-uniform frontage demanded by the classical style, where the two end houses were distinguished by extra height or a protruding frontage, without involving the unprofitable extra cost and increased plot depth of the central portico.
In the Victorian period, terraces again became regular, then in the mid-Victorian period the Italianate style introduced entirely random variations between houses. [1] The heyday of the bookend style was in the late-Victorian of the 1870s and 1880s, by which time domestic architecture had developed its own indigenous vernacular style. [2] The ever-increasing demand for housing in the growing cities of this period led to house sizes shrinking, to match the shrinking households of fewer, and non-resident servants. Many of these new houses were of two storeys, not the previous three-plus-basement. This led to the most familiar style of bookend terrace: a row of between six and twelve houses in total, with the central ones being of two storeys with a longitudinal roof ridge. At each end is a house of the overall same plot size, but of three storeys and with its own independent roof and gables to front and back. The upper storey in these houses have two bedrooms, with sloping ceilings to their sides immediately beneath the roof, rather than having an attic space above. Prestige features, such as bay windows, may be more prominent in the end terraces; either fitted to the end houses alone, or used on both storeys rather than just the ground floor. As there is side access to the end houses, their main 'front' doors are often relocated to the ends walls and may be enclosed in a small porch, while the central houses have their door opening directly to the exterior.
A bay window is a window space projecting outward from the main walls of a building and forming a bay in a room.
A porch is a term used in architecture to describe a room or gallery located in front of the entrance of a building forming a low front, and placed in front of the facade of the building it commands. It can be defined more simply as a "projecting building that houses the entrance door of a building or as a vestibule, or hall.
Terraces of this style appeared throughout the UK, from the suburbs of cities to small villages. A common instance was around the newly developing branch line railway stations, often as the first 'modern' houses in a newly connected village.
The term is most used today in Australia, where it forms part of the estate agent's common descriptive vocabulary, [3] [4] although it is now largely used as a synonym for any 'end terrace' and the size variation is ignored.
An estate agent is a person or business that arranges the selling, renting, or management of properties and other buildings. An agent that specialises in renting is often called a letting or management agent. Estate agents are mainly engaged in the marketing of property available for sale, and a solicitor or licensed conveyancer is used to prepare the legal documents. In Scotland, however, many solicitors also act as estate agents, a practice that is rare in England and Wales.
