Just idly thinking as I was stuck in traffic along a road where the houses had cellars (typical old terrace) and was wondering:
Was there a time when builders all stopped including them?
AIUI they were more popular in some areas than others. Coal storage was useful in some places, in others like Bradford they were used as cheap(er) accomodation.
NT
Yes - main use was for storing the coal. You should also see a coal hole so it didn't have to be brought in through the house. Although some will have been filled in.
Not the same need if you have rear or side access - you could have a coal bunker round the back.
From watching the discovery channel it would appear that around London usually one builder built all the terraced houses in a given location.
Typically he dug out all the cellars in a street to half depth and dumped the spoil in the middle of what was to become the road on top of the service pipes. This produced a flat well drained foundation on which the houses could be built.
In the North (here in fact) it was typical to equip the cellar as a food store &/or laundry but some tenants chose to cook, live and eat down there because the floor area of the house wasn't that great, saving the living room (called hereabouts "The Room") for use as a parlour, which by tradition was never used except for funerals weddings etc.
Space would have been set aside (typically a whole room in the cellar) for fuel storage with a hatch which communicated to outside. In later years a toilet was installed at cellar level typically shared with next door and reached by going outside the front door and going down some steps to the "Area" which also stored the dustbins.
Around 1900 laws were passed which raised the standards of house building, typically the kitchen was big enough to eat in and people started to collect more & more (gardening etc) junk, bikes etc and also owned more soft furniture. By about 1930 the front room started to be brought into use for listening to the radio or playing the piano etc.
Most of the terraced houses were built before WW1 and in the '30s started to be demolished in slum clearances. In the Norrth the council houses that replaced them were more akin to modern semi or town house format, in units of 2,4,6,or 8 dwellings, built on a narrow (13ft.) plot but with long (60ft) gardens.
In the foothills of the Pennines, Calderdale etc, houses were sometimes built which appeared to have been reversed into the hillside, they had 3 storeys at the front and 2 at the rear. These became known as "Under Dwellings". The cellar room had direct access to the street at the front at the front and sometimes the upper floors were accessed at street level at the back.
Derek
In Sheffield they dug out the stone that was then used to build the house - or the clay that was burnt to make the bricks.
As many of my friends who have been conned into buying Barrat Boxes have discovered, a house without a cellar and an attic is uninhabitable - where the ???? do you put all your stuff?
-- JGH
"jgharston" wrote
As many of my friends who have been conned into buying Barrat Boxes have discovered, a house without a cellar and an attic is uninhabitable - where the ???? do you put all your stuff?
In the garage of course - which is why so many cars are parked on the road these days:)
Phil
The walls in a typical Barratt home seem to be hollow - put a few access panels in and dump your stuff in there? :-)
Underdwellings (and overdwellings) tend to be where a house is built into the hillside as you say. The lower floors form one house (the underdwelling) accessed from the lower street level, the upper floors form another house accessed from the other side at higher level. Where the hills are especially steep (such as parts of Hebden Bridge) there are sometimes up to 7 or 8 storeys, and in some houses the 'cellar' of the overdwelling is the rear half of the floor that forms the 'attic' of the underdwelling. Some complicated freeholds to determine who owns what!
A
I have one friend with a pair of rented shipping containers - filled with old Jags, because the garage of his house is full of crap...
We have entire roads full of turn of the century terraced house in downtown Strood, built for the workers when Strood was a commercial port. My youngest daughter lives in one. AIUI the cellars were for delivery of coal without it going through the house. All those I've seen have ceiling heights too low for habitation even though people were smaller 100 years ago.
Later houses tend to be built in smaller terraces so access to the rear via alleyways made coal delivery possible, therefore no need for the expense of building a cellar. I guess gas/electric heating killed off the coal delivery gradually so cellars became redundant - which is a great shame IMO.
As much the requirement for smokeless fuels and cost thereof.
Cellars would make extremely useful utility rooms. Fridge, freezer, dryer, washing machine, GSHP or heatbank, cupboards.
With the exception of the fridge, that's the aim for ours - so far I've only managed to do the dryer part, though :-)
Washing machine's the interesting one (see a thread I started on this a short while ago) due to the need for a holding tank / pump / check valve to get waste water back up to a suitable height for the sewer.
cheers
Jules
The old family home was a Victorian semi, complete with full cellars and an attic.
One of the cellars, which became my dad's workshop, had a big fire, traces of an old copper, and a stone sink, naturally complete with drainage.
The food store had a large stone slab in the middle, which was where we put the food safe in pre-fridge days.
The coal cellar held at least 3 tons, which was handy for filling up at summer prices.
Chris
Is there a limit to how many shipping containers you can have in a garden?
They're not buildings or permanent structures.
And they do stack nicely. :-)
Owain
If theyre BR exempt then the usual requirements that kick in at 5 floors high wouldnt :)
NT
The terraced house I was lived in from 1959 - 71'ish had a cellar arrangement that was the same as the ground floor. 2 of them had massive cast iron ranges in them and the other had a brick and stone built laundry boiler thing. We lived in Birkenhead town centre and I think this house built for a family with servants who would live in the cellars. But whn these houses were built most working class people lived
3 or more families to a house so I think if anyone had enough money to afford servants they would have enough nouse to rent it out to several families.Arthur
Ours originally had a bell board in the kitchen, and many of the wires and linkages were still in place. Clearly the servant accommodation was in the attic, because there was a separate bell pull running directly there from the master bedroom beneath. Certainly nobody living in the cellars.
Chris
I don't know the answer to that, but I do know that around here (Flixton, Manchester) there are definitely roads where there are a whole row of Victorian terraces or Semis, which appear to be of identical construction throughout that road, but some have cellars and some don't. Unfortunately we live in a thirties semi, which typically have no cellars.
SteveW
Have you ever been on HMS Victory? Then remember that Captain "Kiss me" Hardy was 6ft 3ins.
Andy
Average male height was around 5' 6" though....
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