victorian villa ?

[sm_jamieson]

In the latest beeny prog, a semi-detached or terraced victorian house was called a "victorian villa". What is the actually supposed to mean

- or is the phrase just used as at rolls off the tongue ? Simon.

[Andy Burns]

[Hugo Nebula]

I grew up living in a Victorian terrace. Who knew I lived in a Townhouse? And does that mean my 2000's semi detached is an Elizabethan villa?

[Grimly Curmudgeon]

We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold. I remember sm_jamieson saying something like:

They're full of shit. No way was a Victorian terrace or semi ever a 'Villa'. At a stretch a big stone-built semi was sometimes known as a Semi-Villa, but a terrace? Never. Yer actual, proper, VV was a detached house often in reasonably-sized grounds, inhabited by the likes of yer professional classes, who wanted to be well away from the great unwashed and the hoi-polloi.

A similar nonsense is calling what were perfectly ordinary workers' terraces as 'cottages'. What a load of old peasemould. It's nothing more than the middle classes being unable to afford to live in the style their parents did, so they have to dress up the language they use to describe their old working-man's hovel. And 9 times out of 10, the carpets will be gone, as it's just so much more trendy to polish the rackety old floorboards. Bollocks, it's just so much cheaper, is all, but it carries the tag of being fashionable.

[Bolted]

My 1890s semi-detached has "Florence Villa" in the original plasterwork above the door, and many of the identikit houses on the streets around us are likewise called "Villa", including some of the terraced ones. They are largish 4/5/6 bed houses, but clearly the Victorians were themselves already thoroughly debasing the currency of the Villa.

[NT]

Indeed, calling densely packed houses villas was popular then, the same nonsense as goes on today.

NT