The Terrace Houses of Paddington

There is an excellent chapter on terrace houses in the book 'History, Walking Tour and Map of Paddington' published by New Edition Bookshop and available in Paddington Library.  An extract is below:

"These rows of small houses were not built by big property owners as in London, but by small builders - carpenters, bricklayers, plasterers - who would buy one lot at auction, build themselves a house, then move in with their family. Using their first house as security, they would purchase a second lot and on it build a house for letting. You can imagine a row of terraces in the middle of the building boom, with some houses completed, others half-built, and some not yet started.

Each builder tended to try to make his house match its neighbours, at least in the main details on the front facade. He used the same design of cast iron, the same plastering tools and so on. But often the plans of the houses in a single row vary quite markedly.

The plan of the Paddington terraces was simply that of the London terrace (or any inner city terrace for that matter). The majority have five or six rooms on two floors. Indoors, the rooms into which visitors were invited - notably the hall and the 'front room' - were intended to impress, their finishes emulating the homes of the rich. They included marble fireplaces, ornate ceiling roses and cornices and deep skirting boards. Further into the house, the finishes became more humble, although ceiling heights were invariably generous, ranging from ten foot in the smallest to twelve foot in the grander dwellings.

Every back garden boasted an outside toilet - the great Aussie Dunny.  In the absence of any sewers, Paddington was built with a warren of narrow 'dunny lanes' which gave access to the Night Soil Men who emptied the dunes in the dead of the night.

The backs of the houses might have been humble. But the fronts were ornate in the extreme. On the front steps was an intricate patchwork of terracotta and turquoise tiles. Elaborate plasterwork top the windows, with plaster scrolls on each side. Lace frills hang beneath the balconies, and intricate cast iron entwined with heraldic emblems, wattle blossom and galahs form a balustrade. And surmounting the whole wedding cake confection were pediments topped with rampant lions, plaster vases, busts of classical figure and scalloped shells.

The builders vied with each other to give a greater impression of opulence. Many a humble terrace was given a romantic neo-classical name - Ion, Isis, Leona, Ariel and Ceres. Others bore the name of the builder himself - or his long suffering spouse.

Because Paddington was not being built for a big land owner, there was no estate manager to cry Halt to these builders for whom the beauty of their architecture was directly proportional to the quantity of ornament." (the illustration above ends the chapter, the author giving the impression that Cambridge Street has some examples of over-ornamentation)