The Terrace Dan Cruickshank: At Home with the British

In this series, I'm uncovering the history

of the ordinary British home.

I want to explore the homes that most of us live in,

and that most about us take for granted.

From Tudor cottages and Victorian terraces

to post-war high-rise flats,

I want to review how these often ordinary-looking homes

are in fact extraordinary.

Pull.

In each episode, I'll search out the stories

of how and why our homes were built

and I'll explore the evidence of centuries of design and redesign.

Since I've got you here, I can explore your plumbing in detail.

Our homes offer intimate portraits

of our public and our private selves.

From the glass in our windows to the gadgets in our kitchens,

they lay bare how healthy, how wealthy,

even how happy we are.

She kissed the walls.

We have a lot in common - I'm always kissing architecture.

So, she loves her terraced house!

I'll uncover the architectural details

which have shaped our social history and transformed our daily lives.

FLUSHING

I want to go beyond masonry and mortar

and come face-to-face with residents past and present.

I want to understand how they lived,

how they transformed buildings into homes.

The story of how the terraced house conquered the country

is a classic Victorian tale

of far-sighted, public-spirited reform

and short-sighted, private speculation.

It's also a love story of how we met our match

in a house that perfectly expresses

key aspects of the national character -

the obsession with privacy and a love of snooping on the neighbours.

Liverpool is the ultimate Victorian boom town,

turned by trade and industry from a provincial powerhouse

into the second city of Empire.

100,000 terraced houses were built

to accommodate its vast Victorian workforce.

Throughout 19th century Britain,

the terrace reshaped the landscape of every town and city

and in Liverpool that transformation

was more dramatic than almost anywhere.

The terrace became the house that more of us live in than any other,

and it proved the most brilliantly adaptable of homes.

Toxteth, south of Liverpool city centre,

was one area changed beyond all recognition by the terrace.

From the high of Victorian industry and immigration

to the low of post-war decline and decay,

Toxteth's terraces have seen it all.

And it's through the turbulent history of these streets

that I want to chart our enduring love affair with the terrace.

Cairns Street was built in the 1880s

and is typical of Toxteth's terraces.

Nasra and her daughter Shiloh recently moved in

and have fallen in love with their terrace.

Well, how do you feel about your terraced house home?

I absolutely adore it.

It's open plan, it's contemporary,

-but it's got the beautiful, classic Victorian exterior.

-Yeah.

I wonder what she thinks about living here.

Well, she kissed the walls when we first viewed the property,

so that told me everything I needed to know.

-She kissed the walls?

-She kissed the walls.

We have a lot in common - I'm always kissing architecture.

So, she loves her terraced house.

Yeah, she can appreciate how wonderful it is, as much as I do.

-She was excited?

-She was excited.

-SHILOH LAUGHS

I see she is!

It makes a wonderful home, doesn't it?

Yes, the fact that it is a Victorian home,

it gives me the feeling that this is permanent,

this is solid, this is a home I'll remain in,

because of the actual fact that it's a Victorian terrace.

The new-builds do not give me that same feeling.

I imagine you hope you will be here for some years.

Forever.

-Forever?

-I plan forever, Dan!

I want to discover what made the terrace Britain's home of choice

and why we are still as devoted to these houses

as the first inhabitants were well over a century ago.

In the 19th century,

Britain's population almost quadrupled

as millions left the countryside to seek their fortunes

in rapidly industrialising cities,

creating a national housing crisis.

Liverpool was more densely packed than anywhere else on earth,

thanks both to this rural exodus

and to an influx of Irish migrants fleeing the potato famine.

With over 130,000 people per square mile,

many Liverpool families ended up crammed into single rooms

in the town's infamous court houses.

So this is the last example in Liverpool of court housing?

That's right. It was a type of housing that was so prevalent

across the city in the 19th century,

and yet the slum clearance programmes,

as they became known in the late 19th and early 20th century,

were very effective

and a vast number were demolished in that period.

So, these are just two of the court houses that would have existed here.

There would originally have been eight houses in this court.

-So it would have been longer, darker, more overshadowed?

-Yes.

And of course, each house, three storeys above a basement,

four storeys in all, and is essentially one room per floor.

-Exactly.

-So, this is your front door,

there's your neighbours' front door.

That's the space - you're cheek by jowl, aren't you?

You really are living in each other's laps?

Absolutely. And then, at the end of the courts,

it was very common to have the privies and waste pits,

which, again, were shared amongst all the houses.

-All the houses?

-So that could be 10 or 12 houses in some cases.

-Yes.

These are all things that were being commented upon in the 19th century

-by the public health officers.

-Yes.

Dr Duncan, the first medical officer of health in the country,

writes in detail about the conditions he finds in the 1840s.

He's particularly disturbed by the waste he finds in the court.

-The waste - human waste?

-Well, exactly, yeah.

He says, "I found the whole court inundated with fluid filth

"which had oozed through the walls

"from two adjoining ash pits or cesspools,

"and which have no means of escape."

So, quite a disgusting thing to be faced with.

Let's be clear, human waste floating in a little lake of ordure here.

People... Not here, or maybe here.

People had to track and walk through,

play and live in this terrible condition.

William Duncan was a general practitioner

who saw for himself

the terrible effects slum housing had on his patients.

He warned of the link between poor housing and epidemics of disease...

..and in 1846 he was appointed

to reform Liverpool's appalling sanitary conditions.

So this is the entrance to the cellar.

Goodness. A rather unconventional place for an entrance to a...

There's a pole here.

Put it in there...

-and then...

-That seems to be it.

-Oh.

-OK?

Goodness, that's going to be quite a challenge!

Parachute jump? OK...

Oh. It's good.

-OK.

-There's a fireplace still here.

-Oh, wow.

The key thing is, that tells us that this was an inhabited space.

Yes, it was, wasn't it?

I notice a smaller cellar beyond there.

Dr Duncan describes these double decked cellars,

and obviously is very concerned

about the lack of light and ventilation,

and the dampness of that back room.

He describes a cellar in Preston Street,

where nearly 30 individuals slept every night in a double cellar.

30? That's more than one family. All sorts of vagrants...

It must have been quite a group of people gathered together

in a space just like this,

and Duncan's particularly concerned about this

because, "Fever of a malignant type broke out

"amongst the unfortunate beings,"

-which is hardly surprising.

-Yeah, yeah.

Cholera was a massive issue here,

as it was in other cities in Britain,

and there's this wonderful cholera map I got from the library.

1866.

-Yes.

-Mortality map of cholera.

The red dots mark the number of deaths

and we see a rash of red dots over this part of the city.

We're up in this area.

Well, here, yeah, there's a dot literally on the street.

On the other side of the road, yeah.

Liverpool had a particular problem

because of the cellar dwellings - they were unusually common.

It was estimated in the 1840s

that the average age of death of a working-class person in Liverpool

-was only 19.

-19? That is shocking.

The Victorian solution to the problem of high-density housing

was a host of new rules and regulations,

which spelled the end for the old court houses,

and set the template for the homes of the future.

From the 1840s onwards,

the first national housing bylaws were introduced

as a solution to the horrors of Britain's slums.

The bylaws set out minimum standards

to which all new homes were to be built.

This is the ground plan of the bylaw house.

The front room,

the back room,

and the rear yard.

Now, the bylaws insisted that each habitable room

had to have an area of 108 square feet of clear space.

Which means the frontage could be no less than 12 foot.

That gave you an area, of course, for one room, of 144 feet -

but you had to extract the staircase and the chimney breast.

Therefore ensuring 108 feet of clear space, living space.

The back room, here's the back room, similar area.

The bylaws were insistent that these room had to be well ventilated,

big windows, so air could be brought into the house.

Ventilation was all-important

getting rid of the evils of the old slum houses, the court houses,

often with really dark, dank rooms.

Now, through the back door, here, into the rear yard.

According to the bylaws,

the rear yard had to have an area of at least 150 square feet.

Slightly bigger than the rooms.

Again, really, the main reason for that was ventilation.

The bylaw house is small, but it brought about a housing revolution.

It did away with the evil of the court house

and put in a new type of house

that took Toxteth, Liverpool - indeed, the nation - by storm.

Old court housing was phased out

after the introduction of the bylaws,

which specified that the more houses there were around a courtyard,

the wider that courtyard had to be.

Builders chose to construct houses and terraces

instead of around courtyards as soon as it became clear

that more houses could be squeezed into a straight line

than could be fitted around one of the new, wider courtyards.

The bylaws made the terrace Britain's new model home

and, over the course of the 19th century,

a staggering five million were built.

These were houses of decent proportions

which guaranteed their inhabitants light, space and air,

and promised them a far healthier home.

But although the terrace became Victorian Britain's favourite home,

it was far from a Victorian invention.

You can spot examples of terraced housing

in medieval towns and cities -

but the terrace really came of age towards the end of the 17th century.

After the Great Fire of London,

terraces were the mass-produced homes fit for a modern city...

..and in the 18th century,

the terrace became the epitome of elegance,

with uniform classical facades

gracing all the most desirable districts.

But it was only in the 19th century

that terraces were built in such vast numbers

they became homes everyone could aspire to.

The terrace's boom years arrived

when Britain became the world's first industrial superpower.

Liverpool's prosperity was founded on its docks,

which employed tens of thousands of men.

For the second half of the 19th century,

the port was one of the world's busiest,

with dozens of docks along seven miles of the Mersey

handling four million tonnes of goods a year.

In the 1860s,

the Herculaneum Dock opened at the southernmost tip of the dock system,

on Toxteth waterfront.

It handled highly flammable petroleum,

which was stored in vast sandstone casemates.

The dock proved critical

to the development of the area's terraced housing,

as the nature of dock work made it essential

for workers to live within spitting distance of the waterfront.

How tough was at to get a job at the dock?

It could be very tough.

At this point, in the 1870s,

you've got somewhere in the region of 13,000 to 15,000 dock labourers

all competing for work, and the system is a casual system,

so as a dock labourer you have to present yourself every morning

between seven and eight in the hope of getting work.

There's tales of workers

literally getting their clothes torn off their backs

in order to get to the front,

and to catch the eye of the foreman.

A brutal and stressful process, and every day you had to do that.

I suppose... being a big employment opportunity,

the dock led automatically, naturally,

to the creation of terraces nearby.

You've got this large community of dockers

who need to live in this area,

and they're not paid huge wages,

so they haven't got a lot of money to spend on their housing,

so they need fairly low-cost housing,

so you have a hinterland of dockers who live locally

in these terraced houses

so that they could come down every morning

that short way to the waterfront.

Toxteth's development followed a national pattern.

Across the country, street after street of bylaw houses

were built in the shadow of factories, mines and mills.

During the second half of the 19th century,

the grassy fields around most of England's towns and cities

were covered with rows and rows of terraced houses.

What makes the transformation that took place

here in Toxteth so remarkable

is that the layout of the streets and the design of the houses

were largely the work of one man, and that man was Richard Owens.

Owens' story as a typical Victorian tale of industry and endeavour.

He arrived in Liverpool from North Wales in 1851, aged 20,

and worked a joiner while studying architecture at night school.

Within a decade he was making his name

as an enterprising and ambitious property developer.

Control of hundreds of acres of Toxteth Park

had been acquired by David Roberts,

a leading timber merchant who leased the land for developing.

From the 1860s, Roberts employed Owens

to turn this open land into neat little terraces,

and to extract the maximum value from every available plot.

Owens' collection of letter books kept at Liverpool record office

reveal the remarkable scale of the pair's venture.

In this area, the numbers of houses

-are defined by Richard Owens in a letter...

-Yes. Oh!

-..dated in 1877.

-His letters?

He itemises the estates

for which he's been responsible for.

So in this area of Toxteth,

we have estate number one, which is 320 houses,

estate number two, which is 300,

-but estate number three is 1,776...

-Oh!

-Bigger enterprise.

-So, it's a much bigger operation from Roberts.

The fourth estate is the Parliament Fields estate,

which is north of Princes Avenue,

upon which 1,900 houses were constructed.

-Yes.

-The combined area of estate three and estate four

in Toxteth Park is somewhere in the region of 140 acres,

-so it's a huge investment by one developer.

-Mm.

Owens was a canny operator at the heart of a network

of landowners, builders, estate agents and banks

that underpin Toxteth's speculative building business.

Speculating builders built with no specific client in mind.

Instead, they borrowed money to lease plots and finance construction

on the expectation they could sell, or more likely rent,

the finished houses for a healthy profit.

Owens set the pattern for the houses,

providing basic plans whilst leaving their precise detailing

to the builders...

..but he kept a very close eye on construction,

and builders whose workmanship fell short of his exacting standards

faced his wrath.

Do the letter books give us a sense of Owens' character?

Yes, there's a letter here, for instance,

in correspondence to Mr Evan Roberts here.

He asks whether he's fond of lawyers,

because one will be calling on him quite soon.

Clearly something has gone wrong.

-Basically he's threatening to set the lawyers on him.

-Yes, indeed.

That's right. It's called passive aggressive, I think, isn't it?

This is a man with a lot to do - he's got a city to build.

Well, indeed, yes.

For the labour required to turn his plan into bricks and mortar,

Richard Owens relied on an influx of migrants from his native land.

Like Owens, his men arrived in Liverpool

determined to make their fortunes from its building boom.

By the mid 19th century,

several ships a day would make the journey from North Wales,

along the coast, up the Mersey, to Liverpool.

On board were the men who were going to build the terraces of Toxteth.

The promise of better pay and prospects

led Welsh workers to leave their native coalmines and slate quarries.

By 1850, entrepreneurial zeal

had drawn around 20,000 Welsh builders to Liverpool.

Now, this book, called The Welsh Builders Of Merseyside,

commemorates some of these humble and generally rather anonymous men.

As you can imagine, coming from North Wales,

many had the same surnames - Evans, Jones, Williams.

So, their nicknames are all-important to distinguish them,

and the nicknames are, to a degree, portraits of the men.

Here are some of the names. Porky Williams.

Well, of course, you can see him straight away, can't you?

Wiggy Roberts.

Deaf Tom. Footy Tom.

Tom Tom.

Windy Bob. Say no more.

So, it's incredible, you know? These names give them identities.

You can imagine them, can't you?

Also, you can imagine the excitement coming from North Wales,

arriving here at this great world city.

What an adventure.

New arrivals fresh off the boat

gravitated to the vast Nonconformist chapel

on Princes Road in Toxteth.

In its heyday, it had the largest congregation of any Welsh chapel

in the world, and held the key to success

for Liverpool's Welsh builders.

Although now terrifyingly derelict, there are plans to repair it.

Well...

Ben, I must say, the scale of the building

and its architectural quality

does say an awful lot, doesn't it, about the ambitions,

and, indeed, the achievements of the Welsh community

-here in the 1860s?

-Yes.

But they wanted somewhere that was even bigger

than anybody else had.

More than the Irish,

more than the Scots, more than the English.

So this is what they built.

The Cathedral - what they call the Welsh Cathedral.

When I first came here, in 1968, it was very impressive,

and we kept it till 1975.

-Right.

-I preached the last sermon here...

-You did?

-I did!

-In '75.

-1975.

When you preached here, here there were benches, there were chairs.

Pulpit over there.

-Every window was stained glass...

-Yeah.

-..and a beautiful pulpit.

Beautiful...what they call a big seat for the elders.

And this was more than simply a church, wasn't it,

for the Welsh community?

This is where a lot of what they call the elders,

big builders of Liverpool, were.

So young men came from Wales,

and the only thing they needed to find work in Liverpool

was to get what they call a membership ticket

from their own local chapel.

They would hand it over on a Sunday morning to the presiding elder

and say, "We've come to find work,"

and one of them would say, "Yes, can you start tomorrow?"

It was a bit of a closed shop, then?

You couldn't get into the building trades, really,

-unless you came through this building...

-That's right.

-..and you were approved by its elders.

-Yes.

If they were in dire straits, they couldn't find enough workers,

they would sometimes go and find some Irish labourers.

-Yeah.

-But that was not often.

If they could find Welsh people,

Welsh-speaking people and chapel-going people,

that was the first priority.

It was a self-contained community - kind of a Welsh mafia, in a way.

Although Owens' terraces were built in Liverpool,

they owed far more to North Wales than they did to Merseyside.

Their builders exploited the Welsh connection

to source many of their raw materials from their homeland.

For centuries, Welsh slate had been used to roof Welsh houses,

but it wasn't until the 19th century

that slate became the main roofing material of the industrial age.

Wales produced four fifths of Britain's slate.

And Dinorwic was the second largest of the Welsh quarries.

Now, that is lovely, isn't it?

A lovely object.

Would you like to try it?

I'd better try it, just to see how skilful it is,

by revealing what a mess one can make of it.

Right, I'm sure you'll get it.

-You'll be OK with that.

-Well, that's even more pressure!

-OK.

-Here we go.

The size of roofing slate was standardised

and each was given a female title.

Whilst the Mighty Empress boasted impressive vital statistics

of 26 by 16 inches,

the Narrow Lady was a very slight 14 by 7 inches.

-There's your mallet.

-Mallet.

-There's your chisel.

-Sharpened chisel.

This lady has to be forgiving and open up.

-Not too firm.

-Not too firm.

Equally, you can't be too tentative.

You've got to show who's master.

-Now this is a key moment.

-That's it.

-The moment of truth.

-Perfect.

-Oh!

-And again.

OK, you see? She's opened up there.

-She has. She has opened up for me.

-You want to go up there.

She's forgiving.

Ooh...

-Keep going.

-Certainly some interesting sounds

-are coming out of the slate.

-Yes.

-Not sure they sound altogether good.

-There you go.

My God! Right, she parted for me.

Look at that. And with relative... That's lovely.

I mean, how many slates would a chap do in a day?

-Maybe about 800 a day.

-Up to 800 day?

-That's right, yes.

-With the right material.

-That's right.

-A good quality slate.

-Yeah.

-It looks beautiful.

Also entirely practical -

It will endure for eternity, really.

A wonderful material.

For centuries, the cost of getting slate from quarry to building site

ensured that it remained either an expensive luxury

or an exclusively local product.

In the late 18 century,

it was more expensive to transport Dinorwic slate

than it was to produce it.

Incredibly, transporting it seven miles from the quarry to the port

by road, in carts, was more expensive

than transporting it from the port to Liverpool.

In 1848, steam power was introduced onto the Dinorwic line

and by the end of the century

it was carrying 100,000 tonnes of slate a year.

TRAIN WHISTLE

Better transport revolutionised the slate industry,

turning it from local to national, even international importance,

and for Liverpool's speculating builders,

it meant that Welsh slate was cheap enough to use

as their material of choice for roofing their terraces.

Along with slate, the railway revolution

made another home-grown material affordable for Toxteth builders.

This was sourced from the aptly-named Red Works

at Ruabon near Wrexham in North Wales.

This is a lump of Etruria Marl clay.

Fine stuff, look at it.

A deep red in colour.

Now, when this clay was found around here in huge quantities

in the mid 19th century, it made the area's name -

indeed it made the area's fortune.

And the clay was extracted and then put on a conveyor.

Well, you can see it here.

There it is, the conveyor belt's still surviving,

going up in the factory to be milled, to be produced,

to be made into thousands and thousands of wonderful bricks.

The speed and scale of 19th-century house-building

turned brick production from a largely local industry

with individual builders often manufacturing their own bricks,

into a vast industrial process.

Ruabon's brickworks was so productive and so famous,

that the town became known as Terracottapolis.

This yellow one was made in Liverpool - Liverpool common brick.

There we are.

Cheaper product, and looks it, doesn't it, really, in a way?

Rather sort of anaemic,

but this wonderful thing is a Ruabon red brick,

made, of course, here in North Wales.

These bricks were much favoured in the late 19th century,

used for some major buildings.

The Law Courts in Birmingham, for example,

and indeed, Liverpool's university,

made out of the Ruabon red brick,

and that gave its name, really, to redbrick universities.

Incredible. Now, this brick,

it would be about twice the price of a Liverpool common brick,

but even so, the Welsh builders of Toxteth

did find the money to buy them.

They give that little touch of class,

so essential in respected buildings,

to really, kind of, attract the client.

This brick made the houses really look the business.

Owens' terraces had to turn a decent profit for their Welsh builders,

so every decorative flourish was carefully calculated

to catch the eye of prospective tenants.

These terraces were homes of two halves.

One half, with its attractive facade

and its perfectly presentable front room

was designed to be a show home...

..whilst the other half was a real home.

At the back of the terrace, the kitchen, the scullery,

and the rear yard were devoted to daily life and domestic chores.

This layout had instant and abiding appeal,

combining a new sense of privacy with a new pride in the home.

For the first residents,

these terraces were a significant step up in living standards.

Carole's home in Cairns Street

retains many of its original features,

and offers a fascinating insight into late Victorian life there.

The front doors of these terraced houses

were reserved for use by official visitors,

or by strangers like me.

Family and friends went through the back door,

reached by an alley at the rear of the house.

Now, you can see, this house has been rendered with this pebble dash,

but the original brickwork is visible up there -

rather lovely red bricks.

Oh.

Ah, the ground floor front room.

A parlour.

Lovely. Very good cornice.

It's all surprisingly refined.

And the fireplace -

of course, it's made of Welsh slate,

now painted, but certainly slate.

And a bay window.

A big ornament on the street,

also an incentive to keep the room very nice,

because the neighbours could see in,

so this is where your best furniture would be.

This was the best room of the house,

where you would receive your honoured guests,

or a great occasion would take place here.

Otherwise, the door would be kept firmly closed

and all would be, therefore, pristine.

So Carole, how long have you lived there?

48 years now.

So what was life like

in this house when you moved in?

It hasn't changed all that much, cos I haven't had a lot done to it.

-Yeah.

-But we only had one tap.

-One tap?

-Yes, I'll show you.

-I'll show it to you.

-Well, OK.

-Yes, it's out here.

-In what would have been the scullery.

-Yes.

-The ground floor rear room.

Right here.

Was where the tap was,

and then there was a sink here, coming out of the wall there,

and it was only shallow then.

-Right, and that was...

-And that was it.

-That was it.

That was the only tap in the house.

-Yes.

-And...

-Cold water.

-Cold water. One tap.

This plan I've got, I'm holding, is of houses in this area.

This plan was drawn up in the 1890s.

And you can see here, look, here's a house like yours,

-same sort of arrangement.

-Yes.

This particular house here, the scullery

has the sink and tap on this wall.

-Yes.

-This little line shows the water supply,

so you can see water coming in from the alley,

the passage at the back pipe.

Right to the corner.

-That's right.

-Absolutely.

-It was right in the corner.

-And then into the water closet to fill the cistern.

-Yes.

Now, what's interesting to me, since I've got you here,

I can explore your plumbing in detail...

You're captive! ..is that it's upstairs.

-Yes.

-This house has...

-above us, above the scullery, is another bedroom.

-Yes.

-No bathroom showing in this house.

-No, there wasn't a bathroom.

That's amazing.

So you lived in the house much as it had been lived in in the 1880s,

-when the house was new.

-Yes, exactly.

Yeah, you're sort of... Wonderful!

You're living history. Your memories and experiences.

Now, I'd like... I'd love to see what happens upstairs.

So, in the first-floor room above the scullery,

-and is now the bathroom.

-Yes.

-But when did the bath arrive?

Um, 1975.

So what did you do before, when you obviously had - for some years,

you didn't have a bath, what's... How did you wash?

We used to go up to Lodge Lane,

and they had a swimming baths.

Attached to that was a wash house, they called it,

where you used to do washing,

and then next to that was the bathhouse,

and there were little cubicles with baths in

and that's where you went.

How many times a week would people tend to go?

About four times we used to go.

-OK.

-I think it would only be two pence.

-Two pence.

-Nowadays.

Right. And you got a towel?

-You got a towel.

-Soap.

-I think...

I think you got a little block of soap.

-Yeah.

-And you could have as much hot water as you liked,

and it was really fantastic.

Carole's Victorian forebears would also have been regulars

at the bathhouse, which was a great Liverpool institution.

The country's first publicly funded bath and wash house

opened on Frederick Street in 1842.

It boasted ten baths,

open to men in the mornings and evenings

and to women in the afternoon...

..and it proved so popular that by the end of the century

there were 12 bathhouses in the city.

Another great leap forward for public health

came with better plumbing.

In Liverpool's old court houses,

a single water pump at the centre of the court

was shared by around 100 inhabitants,

but in Owens' new terraces,

every household enjoyed a water supply of its own.

The Toxteth reservoir was opened by Liverpool's town council in 1853.

It would bring the plumbing revolution

to thousands of the area's residents.

This is sensational, isn't it?

A great columned hall, like the mosque at Cordoba.

Amazing! And of course, to be absolutely clear, this is where

the water was. It's now empty, but the water was here, wasn't it?

The water was here. This reservoir would have held

two million gallons, or roughly about ten million litres of water.

-Ten million litres?

-Yes.

-Good Lord.

Here's this big stone granite trough coming down diagonally,

with a wonderful lip at the end.

It demonstrates what it does.

The water comes through here, and it gushes down there.

And gushes down there.

-Into the reservoir.

-Absolutely.

And it would have come by gravity down to this.

-OK, no pumping involved.

-No pumping whatsoever.

-It simply comes down here.

-Yes, no pumping.

I can see some other sort of technology over there.

It looks like a ballcock - the biggest ballcock I've ever seen.

So what's this about?

Very simply, this is no different

than the ballcock on your toilet cistern...

-OK.

-..except it's a lot bigger.

-Right.

-And so, as the water rises up,

the ballcock closes the valve at the top...

-Right.

-..and stops the water coming in.

As the water level drops, it opens again.

Right. Fascinating.

Show me how the water got from here to the terraced houses of Toxteth.

Ah!

This dark and secret area holds the answer.

And these are the outlet valves here.

These supplied the mains in the street.

-They did indeed.

-So how did it change people's lives?

Oh, tremendously.

If you'd been living in a court house,

you had to queue up for your water,

quite often at an unsociable hour,

and then suddenly you've got your water on tap.

Thanks to this wonderful, wonderful palace of water!

Yes, indeed!

And piped water delivered to your door

also made possible one of the most ground-breaking

of all Victorian home improvements.

Everything that was smelly, dirty or unsightly happened here.

This is where you'd beat your carpet,

store the rubbish collection,

or hang out the washing,

including the mangled corset

away from the gaze,

rather embarrassing to be seen by neighbours, I suppose,

but, the most important back yard business of all

happened over here.

The outside water closet.

Now this structure is not the original.

Clearly, it's concrete block,

but this is where the lavatory would have been,

and, inside, the wonder of the age.

Now, imagine this - you know, in the 1880s,

to have in your home a private water flushed lavatory, a water closet.

Before that, lavatories were no more than simply holes in the ground,

really, emptied into a cesspit.

They had to be cleared on a regular basis by night soil men.

But now, this house had this wonderful thing.

So, all bodily waste could be removed from the premises

by a mere tug on a chain.

FLUSHING

# Hallelujah

# Hallelujah

# Hallelujah... #

At the Great Exhibition of 1851, a very relieved public

took advantage of George Jennings' flushing water closets -

one of the earliest examples on the market.

Luxurious lavatories would be beyond the means of most Toxteth residents,

but Liverpool was ahead of the rest of the country

in ensuring that, by the 1890s,

every household did at least boast a basic model.

The other fantastic thing about this arrangement

is that, unlike in the courts,

where whole families would queue to use the same privy,

this was a loo of one's own.

It marked another significant step from traditional communal life

to a more discreet and private way of living.

Excuse me.

# In me Liverpool home

# In my Liverpool home... #

A Victorian housewife's home was her pride and joy.

And the humbler the home, the more house-proud the housewife.

The secret weapon of working-class wives in the North of England

was donkey stone - a scouring block made of powdered stone and bleach,

which promised a front step to put the neighbours to shame.

Donkey stoning the front step remained standard practice

into the middle of the 20th century.

So you're going to introduce me to the great ritual

of donkey stoning the front steps of the terraced house.

-Mm-hm.

-And, of course, over there, you've got some donkey stone.

I have, different colours.

-Oh.

-Dark, light and cream.

OK. So here we've got the dark...

Darkish, the darkish one, sort of light brown.

Why is it called donkey stone?

The first large company had a picture of a donkey on the stone.

-Oh, I see.

-So it became known as donkey stone.

So here's a fragment of precious donkey stone,

so I can apply this to the stone step,

so I have the authentic experience

of the Toxteth housewife in the 1890s,

transforming her terraced house into the home and beautiful.

So, how do I begin?

Get your hand brush.

-OK. Warm water...

-And clean the dirt out of the...

-Oh, I see.

-Yeah, that's right.

That's exactly right.

OK.

Let's... OK, if the job is worth doing, it's worth doing well.

-Let's get down to this.

-Yeah.

So ten minutes later, I'll still be doing this! Never mind.

So, as a girl, this is what you did?

I did.

About 12 year old, that was my pocket money of a Saturday morning.

I used to go and do it for an elderly lady

and I would do her front and the back yard...

-Right.

-..and the toilet.

It would also be pretty much of a social event,

people stoning their steps.

People would be outside

and they'd be saying, "Good morning, how are you today?"

I imagine there was quite a lot of competition

amongst the Toxteth housewives, all in rows,

donkey stoning their front steps to see who would get the best one.

People would notice if you hadn't done yours

and it would be something of a gossip,

amongst the neighbours.

"Oh, Mrs so-and-so hasn't done hers,"

or, "Doesn't it look a mess?"

OK, but how do I...?

-Now, you're going to apply the...

-I'm already exhausted, by the way!

-You're going to apply the stone.

-OK. Oh, my goodness.

-You don't need to press on too hard.

-Not too hard. OK.

-OK, I...

-Yeah.

Just carry on going right across.

Carry on, just gently.

Oh! It is... It is...

It is, you know, skilful work, and also it's hard work.

It is hard work. And one's hands, of course, completely wrecked.

I mean, I'm not very proud of this, I'm afraid.

It looks a bit streaky to me.

-What do you think?

-I think you've done a job well done there.

-Yes.

-It must have wrecked their hands, wrecked their knees,

broken their backs, but so what?

The net result was a lovely home.

By the end of the 19th century,

Richard Owens hadn't just developed thousands of homes in Toxteth,

he'd also dramatically shaped the area's social hierarchy.

Owens created homes fit for Victorians

from almost every walk of life.

For working-class dockers, there were two-up, two-downs

near the waterfront, whilst at the other end of Toxteth,

positively palatial terraces were designed for well-to-do merchants.

I've got a transcript of the 1891 census for Cairns Street,

and this should give me some sense of the community

that occupied these terraced houses when they were relatively new.

Now, let's start with this house here.

Number 28.

Um, one head of the family here.

Hugh Ellis.

He's 39, he's a tobacco warehouse labourer,

so, interesting, he's working in the docks and he was born in Wales,

a Welsh-born Liverpudlian dock labourer.

His wife, Elizabeth,

they had two sons and a daughter and they have a lodger.

A bit of money is being made by renting out a room.

A Joseph Parry, a merchant's clerk,

so probably also working in the docks nearby.

So as I say, six rooms, six people. Now let's look at another house.

Now this house, 31 Jermyn Street, is absolutely amazing.

It retains virtually all of its original decorative details.

Look, pedimented porches, lovely.

Flights of steps to the elevated ground floor.

Well, let's see who was living here in 1891.

The head of the household was Edward Meyer.

And he was... Oh!

..the vice consul for Germany.

So this was the home of the main German diplomat in Liverpool

in the 1890s.

Now, let's see. His wife, Emma, and his two children,

Marguerite and Lionel, and they had a servant, a Margaret Purse.

So there we go, from one, two, three, four, five -

five people in this house of 10 to 12 rooms.

In an age obsessed with the subtlest distinctions of class,

Owens' terraces also reinforced the reassuring social divide.

These two streets represent something rather fascinating

about late 19th century Toxteth -

they are physically so near, yet socially, worlds apart.

By his death in 1891,

Richard Owens had grown rich on the back of his terraces,

and had founded one of Liverpool's leading architectural practices,

which survived for over a century.

Owens had at least 10,000 of the city's homes to his name,

and he was so successful that he may well have been responsible

for more terraced houses in Victorian Britain than anyone else.

When they were built, Britain's 19th century terraces

were a vision of a new world,

promising the highest living standards possible

for working-class Victorians.

But by the middle of the 20th century,

the fate of millions of these homes was in doubt.

Many had been destroyed or damaged by wartime bombing,

and many more fell victim to neglect.

-ARCHIVE:

-Drive around any of our old industrial towns.

Sooner or later, mostly sooner, you'll come to this -

grey acres, street after street of incredible monotony.

As British industry began a slow but sure decline,

millions of the terraces' tenants lost their livelihoods.

In the early 1950s, manufacturing employed 40% of the workforce,

but as that figure fell, to less than 10% today,

the country's industrial heartlands became urban wastelands.

Liverpool was one of the places hardest hit

by the decay of the post-war years.

The dramatic decline in trade coming through the port

set the city on a devastating downward spiral.

As work disappeared, Liverpool's population deserted it.

In the 1970s, around 10,000 people a year left the city.

In Toxteth, many better-off residents,

including many of those originally from Wales,

moved out to the suburbs,

making way for some of Liverpool's poorest citizens.

From the 1950s,

the area had become the heart of the city's black community...

..but rogue landlords also moved in,

buying up empty properties and turning decent family homes

into ones no better than the court houses they had replaced.

As chronic unemployment took hold,

the desirable 19th century neighbourhood

became one of Britain's worst slums.

In the late 1960s, early '70s,

Nick Hedges recorded Toxteth's decline in photographs,

taken for the housing charity Shelter.

When they were newly built,

Richard Owens proudly described Jermyn Street houses

as desirable properties in a first-class street.

But when Nick photographed them some 80 years on,

he found that they were anything but.

This first one is a picture of a woman

cooking on an open fire

with a saucepan of potatoes ready to start.

-The gas and electricity had been cut off.

-Yeah.

So she was living in very reduced circumstances.

The scene is like a scene from an illustration of a 19th century slum,

and basically, cooking over the open coals in a frying pan

-in one's living room.

-I know.

-It's an amazing scene.

This picture, which I think I'm very fond of,

this was a really tragic story.

This guy worked for the Liverpool council...

-Yeah.

-..but the house that they were living in,

they were living in one room, as you can see,

there's a double bed over here.

-Yeah.

-But the house had no running water.

That's why there are a proliferation of buckets around.

Because whenever they wanted any water,

they had to cross the street to a neighbour to collect water.

And this was a family of...

-Right.

-..a mother, a father and two children.

I wonder where the children slept? One double bed for them...

-They all slept together.

-They all slept in that bed.

-Yeah.

In the basement of some houses,

Nick discovered conditions eerily similar

to the city's notorious 19th century cellar dwellings.

I was brought in by Mrs Ditchfield...

-Yeah, yeah.

-..who appears in this photograph...

-Yeah.

-..and she's descended the cellar stairs.

-Mm.

I thought she was going to show me something to do with damp,

but in actual fact, she was showing me her living accommodation.

-Her living accommodation!

-Yeah, I know.

Which was extraordinary. I mean, the cellar,

which had no natural lighting,

was incredibly damp, as you can see from the walls,

and she lived with her daughter, her teenage daughter, in this room.

-Mm.

-Extraordinary.

-I say, this is profoundly shocking.

-It is.

-This is the 1960s.

It looks like an image from a slum of the 1860s.

There were still people living in basically subterranean -

like troglodytes - in a damp hole in the ground.

-I mean...

-Yeah. Looking at the picture now,

it reminds me of photographs that you see these days,

you associate with people who are taking shelter,

-taking shelter in war zones.

-Mm.

But these people weren't taking shelter.

-This was the only room they had they could find to live in.

-Mm.

Five million people living in slum housing

were not just deprived of light, air and the most basic amenities,

poverty also denied them any sense of pride in their homes.

The disaster that befell so many of Britain's terraces

was a fault not of the houses themselves,

but of their inhabitants' circumstances.

Yet successive post-war governments

saw the terrace as a cause of the problem -

one which could only be solved by knocking down millions of homes.

Liverpool council's approach was particularly radical.

In 1966, it proposed demolition

of almost three quarters of inner-city Victorian houses.

In Toxteth, many of the streets laid out by Richard Owens

were razed to the ground...

..but sweeping away the terraces

could not erase deeper problems of poverty,

crime and racism.

In 1981, Liverpool reached its lowest ebb

when Toxteth was the scene of some of the worst rioting

the country had ever seen.

-REPORTER:

-Stones and lumps of iron were thrown.

Worst of all, the petrol bombs.

# Listen to the music

# Hear about a place

# People call the shady side of town... #

The despair of 30 years of decline and deprivation were unleashed

as Toxteth residents turned on their own streets.

By dawn, the full extent of the damage had become clear.

One of Toxteth's busiest shopping streets resembled a wartime scene.

Dozens of shops had been looted, burned

and then totally destroyed.

The area around Granby Street saw some of the worst of the violence

and, for 35 years after the riot,

was left mostly desolate and decaying.

Now, it's being regenerated.

Although just four of the streets Richard Owens developed

in this part of Toxteth survive,

the reinvention is proof that there is plenty of life left

in the terraced house.

For me, growing up in a terraced street,

I think it's that kind of sense of security

and there was also a kind of, you know,

you probably knew everybody within the street.

I mean, it's great, because there's another language.

-This is an area of languages.

-Yeah.

And the one that has been going,

probably since the Victorian times,

is the language of knock-on-the-wall.

It's like bang, bang! "Have you got any sugar?"

-Whatever.

-Oh, OK!

-It sounds a bit corny, but I think, you know,

-like, bang, bang! "Turn the music down!" Whatever it is.

-Yeah!

Remarkably, the refurbishment of ten derelict houses

in neighbouring Cairns Street

has even won Assemble architects the 2015 Turner prize.

By reintroducing human craft to these houses,

and by re-adapting the terraces' form,

Assemble have been have been the salvation of these houses.

One of the Assemble houses,

which had been reduced to little more than a shell,

is now Nasra's home.

I definitely admire the architects,

that they've done things that are both practical, durable

and aesthetically beautiful.

When I have people around, family and friends,

-everybody can just enjoy and breathe.

-Yeah.

There's not these two separate rooms, which are now out of date.

And that, of course, was absolutely the point.

The plan was appropriate hundreds of years ago,

when people wanted, you know, a sitting room,

separate dining room, little compartments -

now, of course, people favour light and space and the open plan.

Well, I say, well, it's fantastic,

you see how easily a terraced house like this can accommodate that.

-Yeah, it's got substance to it.

-Yeah.

-This is lovely, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-This big, curvaceous, newel post.

-This is obviously original.

-Beautiful, isn't it?

-So some details have been kept and reused.

-Yeah, I love this.

So it obviously, two bedrooms, front one is the big one,

-smaller one behind.

-Yeah, it's beautiful. Big bedroom.

This is your room,

and your daughter at some point should move next door?

She's got her lovely double bedroom.

She'll be able to grow into it.

Straight away, we're going to paint it, you know, the baby pink,

and I'm going to put even a little baby chandelier in there. Pink!

Also, you get a sense she's part of a safe community,

cos each house is a private world,

created to suit the people who live in it.

-Yeah.

-Their own front door,

but the moment you go through the front door into the public world,

well, that's also the communal world - you know the neighbours,

you know the people opposite, the people next door.

It is nice to open my door and be able to speak to my neighbours,

because in many properties

I've had no relationship with my neighbours at all.

In my last property that I was at, I barely knew the neighbours.

Now at this property, it's, "Hello", you know,

numerous times throughout the day, and it's nice.

The rebirth of houses like Nasra's

has restored faith in the terrace's future.

300 of Richard Owens' Toxteth houses

had been scheduled for demolition for over a decade.

These were some of the nation's most neglected terraces,

but within a week of the Turner Prize announcement,

Liverpool City Council performed a remarkable U-turn.

Bowing to pressure from campaigners and central government,

it finally declared that these terraces

would be spared the wrecking ball.

Once remodelled, repaired and repopulated,

these houses will stand as proof of both the terrace

and Toxteth's extraordinary transformation.

Next time, I'm exploring the high-rise flat,

the home designed to do away with the decaying terrace.

I'll see how multistorey living was made possible...

and discover why this was a home loved and loathed in equal measure.