Essential Guides & Advice Victorian And Edwardian Property

Date Published:

21/05/2008

The industrialisation of Britain during the Victorian age created seismic shifts in the way people lived. Suddenly the countryside was deserted as families rushed in to provide workforces for the new factories in the rapidly growing towns.

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These workforces needed somewhere to live and the Victorians, masters of brick and steel, rose to the challenge creating the endless terraces of humble redbrick workers’ cottages, middle class villas and townhouses that are still found in every town across the UK.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries the Arts and Crafts movement emerged. A reaction to the Victorian preoccupation with industry, pastiche and mass production, the style was gentler and more decorative than anything that had been seen for a while, and harked back to a more rural, crafts-based, pre-industrial way of life. Homes from this era tended to be either simplified versions of Victorian terraces, villa designs or urban cottages.

Today many Victorian properties offer ideal opportunity for modernisation and development. A good example of this can be found at Chimney Pot Park. Here developer Urban Splash and architects Shedkm, in conjunction with Salford Council, have recently turned the living spaces of a row of Victorian terraces upside down, placing mezzanine level kitchens in loft space and making inventive use of external areas to create parking and a first floor terrace.