Upstairs, downstairs

The Victorian terrace is one of the unsung heroes of 19th-century architecture, not only elegant and space efficient, but also highly adaptable to the changing demands of modern life, believes Clive Aslet

- Clive Aslet

FOR heaven’s sake, my dear,’ a wellwisher advises Lady Alexandrina de Courcy, in Trollope’s The Small House at Allington, when she is considering the properties that her future husband is prepared to offer her, ‘don’t let him take you anywhere beyond Eccleston Square!’ Trollope was referring to the perils of Pimlico, the development of terraced houses master-minded by that great Victorian entrepreneur Thomas Cubitt as a less aristocratic version of Belgravia—and, as ever, Trollope got it right. Echoing other neighbourhoods in Victorian London, their streets lined with terraces, Pimlico had aspirations: the area could even be described, by a journalist of 1877, as an ‘abode of gentility’, with ‘a servant or two in the kitchen, birds in the windows, with flowers in boxes, pianos, and the latest fashions, of course’. Some of the inhabitants—those in the squares—kept carriages and wore ‘opera cloaks of surpassing gorgeousness’. But, for the most part, the area never took off.

Houses in the lesser streets descended into multiple occupation—oh, the scorn that Dickens poured on families who had to share a communal front door—by a motley assembly of draper’s clerks, professors of music, ironmongers, dressmakers, men working in the nearby penitentiary on the site of what is now Tate Britain and the inevitable Victorian caste of spinsters and widows. Some of the lodging houses were respectable, but others were not. It acquired a dubious reputation, as revealed by the cavalierly uncompromising estate agent Roy Brooks in his 1985 book Brothel in Pimlico. Passport to Pimlico, made in 1949, was actually filmed over the river in Vauxhall, but Pimlico sounded funnier. It had become something of a joke.