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I like exploring on Google Maps and driving around out of the way towns and stuff just to see the sights and imagine what its like to be in some of these places, and I am finding that when I am checking out small towns in the UK, all of the homes/buildings are located RIGHT UP against the street, even when there are acres of land behind the house. I would imagine that if I lived there, I would want some space between where I lived, and the street. I can't imagine NOT hearing the noise of cars going by, or even accidents with automobiles crashing into some of these houses/buildings. Is this just the way things are done there?

It's the norm across pretty much the entire Old World.

Why is that?

Not everyone had fast means of transportations.

..Mind that some of our houses were built/rebuilt in locations when there weren't any cars or similar

Loads of streets were created and built up from when personal transportation wasn't really a thing, so there was no reason to leave any space in front of the house. Towns got pretty popular around industrialization too so people wedged themselves in pretty tight.

Space has always been at a premium so for a lot of people having a garden in the front of the house that's bigger than parking is a waste. New build houses tend to have space for about 2 cars at the front, houses from about 10-30 years ago have smallish gardens at the front, many of which have been turned into parking. Bigger houses tend to have more garden, older houses tend to be closer to the road.

We've generally preferred having a larger garden out back, as it's a bit more private.

 reds8n wrote:
..Mind that some of our houses were built/rebuilt in locations when there weren't any cars or similar

Mind that some of our houses were built/rebuilt in locations when there wasn't a New World.

Fixed your typo.

Understand in North America even in brownstones and shotgun houses you typically have sidewalks in front or a yard. This is for safety so the local mocha latte drinking Audi driver doesn't kill you dead stepping out your door.

New Orleans is more the British style, and has tiny, terrifying streets if you get off Bourbon street. Grandma had a fully enclosed house and wall around and internal courtyard with colored glass on the top of the wall as was the fashion. Small rooms and a giant kitchen in relation. Everyone stayed in the kitchen.

Typically in the medieval period you'd build houses right up against the road so you could also run businesses from them, and potential customers could see what you were offering,

If there was any land without buildings on it would be at the back where you could set up a garden to grow food to live on (which if it was at the front of the property in front of the house would be much more liable to theft)

Only if you were really wealthy would you have a house surrounded by land, in which case you could afford to wall it in, afford to have servants to keep and eye on your property and buy your food rather than having to grow all of it yourself

In the UK a lot of older towns are laid out on the basis of burgage plots dating back to the Middle Ages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burgage

Such plots were narrow and deep, fronting on to the market place or main road, with vegetable gardens behind the house/shop.

We like our greenery, but also privacy. Hence we favour back Gardens

Though if you want to see where I live, google map Montacute Gardens. There's only the one!

Ha! Thats a nice looking estate you have there.

But I am seeing more modern looking homes still being built right on the side of the road. With plenty of space behind them. Like, open fields. So these arent the old rock and mortar looking homes from a century ago.

Here's some random locations I quickly found:

https://www.google.com/maps/@54.0899563,-0.3273969,3a,75y,29.15h,84.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sOPHyDSh8ACwlN6o-LRJcWA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

If that red brick building on the corner were in the US, it would no longer be standing.

The Isle of Man looks amazing by the way, but check out this tanish house on the side of the road:

https://www.google.com/maps/@54.2315966,-4.616682,3a,75y,261.11h,77.91t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1siWPDXZYmhv9s6awYxpTKyQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

AND THEN LOOK AT ALL THE SPACE BEHIND IT.

Ok ran out of time I have to go, but there are many others like this. Not all are like this, there are some with some space in front like we have in the US, I was just surprised how many I was seeing like this. If I owned a huge lot of land for example, I would want my house to be some distance from the road, but it seems many put their homes right on the road.

I'll see if I can find some better examples tomorrow.

KTG17 wrote:


https://www.google.com/maps/@54.0899563,-0.3273969,3a,75y,29.15h,84.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sOPHyDSh8ACwlN6o-LRJcWA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

If that red brick building on the corner were in the US, it would no longer be standing.

That looks like an old miners cottage row, so it probably a lot older than it looks. It looks fairly new so I wonder if it's been rebuilt. That's quite normal in a lot of places, we've got houses like that round our market square (lots of mining up here).

The Isle of Man looks amazing by the way, but check out this tanish house on the side of the road:

https://www.google.com/maps/@54.2315966,-4.616682,3a,75y,261.11h,77.91t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1siWPDXZYmhv9s6awYxpTKyQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

AND THEN LOOK AT ALL THE SPACE BEHIND IT.

That's farmland. Why'd you want to waste farming space by putting a house in it?
You've got off-street parking, a standalone garage, some garden space, a huge house and then farmland. That's not the farm though, it'll be off another road round the back. Could be they've sold a plot or built a house for one of the kids or something. Though in saying that, it looks a bit like a converted church?

Houses like that are totally normal in rural areas too. usually the roads are narrower though

You should see and experience the Pantiles, just to the right of where I live.

Origin of Royal Tunbridge Wells, and a superb place to have a pint in weather,

I have sufficient space I feel.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
It should be noted any roads visible in that image are private too.

KTG17 wrote:


The Isle of Man looks amazing by the way, but check out this tanish house on the side of the road:

https://www.google.com/maps/@54.2315966,-4.616682,3a,75y,261.11h,77.91t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1siWPDXZYmhv9s6awYxpTKyQ!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

AND THEN LOOK AT ALL THE SPACE BEHIND IT.

I was driving around the North of England/Scotland a few months back, and saw plenty of houses in position like that. The thing to remember is that in rural areas, they get maybe five or six cars a day going past even though they're next to the road. It's not exactly what you'd call saturated with noise pollution.

This is the street I used to live on before I moved to Canada. Rainy days were terrible as you would get splashed by oncoming cars and there was nowhere to hide! Head forward a bit and check to your left and you will see a street that Google Maps loved to redirect cars through despite it being waaay too narrow. Many a car got wedged 5 feet up in the air much to my amusement.

https://www.google.com/maps/@54.093551,-0.211216,3a,75y,102.79h,85.81t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1s4RiXjyTPghsF1CUdoPwgsg!2e0!7i13312!8i6656


Travelling down the street now I forgot how incredibly English everything is, it couldn't be more Yorkshire if it tried!

You get used to the noise. Even living next to train tracks can be ignored after a week or 2.

Some houses do have driveways, but they are generally much newer.

Don't forget, in the USA a hundred years is a long time. It's not like that here, quite a few of our roads are still Roman.

Mostly because the bloody council Don't build anymore of them.

Dude you would lose you mind trying to understand rural Ireland.

I'm a student planner and as far as I know so far, most western, hell most civilizations, build right up to the street because it's economic.

Small front gardens are known as "defensible space" in planning language, and are encouraged as a way of personalising your door step, but not making it private.

Slightly larger ones given over to parking, or full driveways are renowned for removing soft surfaces and providing hard cover that leads to more rain run off and more localised flooding. If you must have parking, it should be sustainable urban drainage that holds water, or funnels it to plant life and area's that can take it.

Look at new areas built in the Netherlands to really get a sense of how this can balance out. Like the new part of Houten near Utrecht.


Also in the Irish context, our bizare house and placement comes down to land ownership and practices. In our historical context a new way of laying the land came along every 150-300 years. First it was the Catholic missions, then the Vikings, then the Normans and their "burages", then English plantations, then the agricultural revolution and the whole "to hell our to Connaught" mess, then the Land League (where we became to pretty much the only nation in Europe to totally abolish massive land holdings and democratised land ownership), then modern interventions, trends and tastes.


Unlike many nations land in Ireland has been moving from a position of every family owning some property or a farm, to less and less hands. Thus farmers carve off 1/2 acre at a time, especially with "a bit of road frontage" to their sons and daughters, or whatever the local authority will let them sell. This helps fuel our rural once off houses and ex-urban sprawl.

Then we have a very reactionary planning process that favours developers building anything as long as it fits the plans. To translate, we haven't done phased or strategic planning until recent years. A developer with several acres or even hectares could build whole estates several 100 metres to even a few Km from existing settlements if it was a good plan, or he knew who's shoulders to rub and hands to grease. So the disjointed sprawl was always lead by who had the land, the finance, and the vision to screw people, not housing need lead by sustainable and strategic thinking...

But even with the mess of bungalo's and McMansions dotting the landscape we still have massive farms, natural and introduced woodlands, and hedgerows. Continental Europe doesn't bother with ditches and hedges between fields, it's all open if it's the same owner or collective village. Here every historic plot and field is divided out. A hangover from subsistance farming and once having a far higher population, thanks organised starvation of 1844-48, or "Irish Famine".

In Spain is this way to. All of the houses are just over the street. Those typical american urbanizations with a big front yard are basically inexistant here!

KTG17 wrote:Ha! Thats a nice looking estate you have there.

But I am seeing more modern looking homes still being built right on the side of the road. With plenty of space behind them. Like, open fields. So these arent the old rock and mortar looking homes from a century ago.

Here's some random locations I quickly found:

https://www.google.com/maps/@54.0899563,-0.3273969,3a,75y,29.15h,84.59t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sOPHyDSh8ACwlN6o-LRJcWA!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

If that red brick building on the corner were in the US, it would no longer be standing.

Those are old. The original layout is, at a guess, older than the USA. That said, I think you're casting some harsh aspersions on the quality of US driving! This is noral across most of the world, as we've said, and so is commonplace in many countries famed for their bonkers driving. Heck, I work part of every summer in Iraq, where driving is, at best, erratic, and their houses that are right against the road survive just fine.

Ok ran out of time I have to go, but there are many others like this. Not all are like this, there are some with some space in front like we have in the US, I was just surprised how many I was seeing like this. If I owned a huge lot of land for example, I would want my house to be some distance from the road, but it seems many put their homes right on the road.

Very, very few people own a 'huge plot of land' and what someone from the US, depending on the state, would describe as 'huge' could likely represent 'entire arable farm' in much of the UK. Estate agents here will describe a back garden of a couple hundred metres as a huge garden.


Huge amount of simplification coming: I do this for a living (sort of) but I'm trying to avoid paring down on the endless variables!
It's cultural. Most of the world has a fairly unbroken line of settlement patterns in still occupied major settlements for several hundred, if not several thousand, years. Building houses right on the road was the norm so you could trade from your door and all your farming land wasn't in the way of the thoroughfare that linked structures and components of the settlement. It just didn't change. It was esepcially prominent in hyper-planned Roman settlements, and continued into the new foundations of Christiandom where you wanted everyone to have access from their door to the road into, out of, and through the settlement (and to the church!), and didn't want to waste any potential farmland - so that remained at the rear. When Europeans eventually turned up in places like the Americas and Australia, farming practices were less focussed on personal plots; importantly, there wasn't an established way of parceling the land that the settlers could comprehend; and quite frankly, people were astounded at the amounts of space available, so you had a sudden paradigm shift in planning that you could otherwise draw a pretty consistent line through from Sumer.

We don't have the space for fronts. Back yards are a luxury in some places, like where I used to live:
https://goo.gl/maps/mRGx2nqWL4m
These estates were built by a factory owner around 1900 or so for his employees. There was a shop or two, and a church, on as small a space as possible.
Tourists go to the National Trust Back-to-back houses in Birmingham, but elsewhere, people are still living in them.

If there is a lot of land behind a row of front-on houses, it will have either had buildings there at one time, or the space was planned to have been built on.

Older places had a dirt track between the houses, and a proper road through town. With some houses leaning into the houses opposite, there's hardly space to pass, let along sit:
https://goo.gl/maps/nSH8kMEuaNu

Lots of this was built on sites from before the Romans moved in.
Ever since, space has been a expensive.

When the settlers landed in the New World, they had literally green-field sites to build on. Spread out as much as you like, but you have further to go to get anywhere.
Here, most trips to the shops are walked, but I hear even the 'corner shop' in the US could be a block away.

So, front spaces are not used much. Back gardens are more common, to make your own.


And, this leads onto why we game at clubs, as the stores here are restricted by the same price of land. Small shops means few gaming tables, and clubs meet in shared venues, that don't use the space all the time.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
We like our greenery, but also privacy. Hence we favour back Gardens

Though if you want to see where I live, google map Montacute Gardens. There's only the one!

Bah Montacutes got nothing on Yeovil,,, nothin ya hear me. Well maybe it has. Bloody lots more. Lol

Thanks for all your answers! Many make total sense.

When I have downtime at work sometimes I go onto Google Maps and explore far away places like New Zealand, Scotland, etc, and love rural places with few people. I hope to be able to travel to some of these places, rent a car, and explore on my own.

And I do find places with the homes further away from the road, like here:

https://www.google.com/maps/@58.942759,-3.2096067,3a,75y,61.11h,74.81t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sZHxufkyrv257AgdbMp_8_Q!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

And that's very much how you would see things in rural USA. My great aunt had a huge farm in Michigan and the house and barn were far from the road. The crops were just laid around the house.

Anyway, very interesting to see how other peeps live. And as far as space goes in the US, yes we do still have a lot of it for most people, although the cities are getting bigger in many places and the sprawl is expanding. People get packed in apartments here like anywhere else, but not as bad as some other places. I went to Hong Kong earlier this year, and Mumbai a few years ago, and got first hand lessons of what over-crowding looks like. And it blows. The only way to build is up. Going to be very Necromunda-like.

And I live in a suburb in small-big city in Florida (meaning its a city, but not a big one), and all I dream about is getting away from the noise and crowds, and its not even that bad here. And if I were to re-locate to some of these far away places, and owned some nice acreage, I certainly wouldn't want the house right up on the street. So why others did had baffled me.

Thanks!

It depends. In Glasgow, lots of housing is tenements - four-storey blocks thrown up to house factory workers in the 1800s. Some have a front garden, but it's tiny - six or 8 feet between the pavement (sidewalk) and the building, if that. Others are right up against the street. Some of those are still 'orrible slums, but plenty are now desirable city-centre flats (apartments). The problem now is that you've got 8 families living in the frontage of two houses, and there's no room for the cars.

Having said that, I've always been more suburban than that - my parents' house has a front and back garden, although about a third of the front garden is taken up with a driveway for the car. My current place has a front garden, but it's small, and with no real fence between it and the street, it's really only a rather useless lawn.

Mind you, it's not just Europe; there's not may New York brownstones with front gardens, either.

KTG17 wrote:

And I live in a suburb in small-big city in Florida (meaning its a city, but not a big one), and all I dream about is getting away from the noise and crowds, and its not even that bad here.

It really isn't, no. The only places I've been in the US are Florida and Texas, and in both cases I wondered when we'd actually arrive in a city only to have taxi drivers tell me we'd been travelling through Orlando/San Antonio for half an hour or whatever. I couldn't understand why all the buildings were so far apart. Downtown San Antonio was like a small modern, commuter town in Scotland but even more spacious. Having to drive to get around in a city? Absurd!

The one bit of urban planning that the UK - or Scotland, at least - copied from the US was the idea of running a motorway through the middle of a city. They got halfway through the idea in Glasgow, then decided it wasn't worth the bother to finish it (although it was sort of completed forty years later).

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
The one bit of urban planning that the UK - or Scotland, at least - copied from the US was the idea of running a motorway through the middle of a city. They got halfway through the idea in Glasgow, then decided it wasn't worth the bother to finish it (although it was sort of completed forty years later).

You wouldn't get a bunch of pedestrian crossings like Charing Cross on those US monsters, though!

Somehow or other this thread is making me want to visit the UK and see all this for myself. It's fascinating to me to see how people in faraway (from me) places live, both the similarities and differences.

As mentioned above, its basically an artifact of medieval town construction. You didn't have any transportation other than your own feet unless you were rich. So all buildings were built close to the road for access to a more central location.

This is also why many of the old districts of various old world cities have some extremely narrow streets and alleyways. Everybody traveled by foot. Only major roads needed to be wide enough to allow wagons or horses to fit. Plus it was a space saver. The fact that most of these districts were also not planned out in any way is why they also tend to be rather labyrinthine in their layout. No nice grid patterns, just a meandering maze. It's pretty common in any city that was built in a time period before urban planning. Few cities in the US are like this because most were either planned out to a large extent or had many areas get rebuilt. And the greater space that was available in north america just lent itself to buildings being set further off from the roads.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

nfe wrote:

KTG17 wrote:

And I live in a suburb in small-big city in Florida (meaning its a city, but not a big one), and all I dream about is getting away from the noise and crowds, and its not even that bad here.

It really isn't, no. The only places I've been in the US are Florida and Texas, and in both cases I wondered when we'd actually arrive in a city only to have taxi drivers tell me we'd been travelling through Orlando/San Antonio for half an hour or whatever. I couldn't understand why all the buildings were so far apart. Downtown San Antonio was like a small modern, commuter town in Scotland but even more spacious. Having to drive to get around in a city? Absurd!

Well, as mentioned. It depends on what you mean by city.

What most Europeans would call a city, is what Americans would call "the Inner City". Somewhere with hyper-dense population.

In the US things are more gradual. Inner City>suburbs>rural. In Europe the line is much more abrupt. You're in a hyper dense urban area, and then suddenly you're out in the sticks.

This is largely due to the US just being utterly massive. Main reason "public transportation" isn't as much of a thing here. You need a certain density for it to be viable, and thats largely not the case here.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Well, as mentioned. It depends on what you mean by city.

What most Europeans would call a city, is what Americans would call "the Inner City". Somewhere with hyper-dense population.

In the US things are more gradual. Inner City>suburbs>rural. In Europe the line is much more abrupt. You're in a hyper dense urban area, and then suddenly you're out in the sticks.

I'm not sure that that is true. I can't think of a European city without suburbs. That said, what I was referring to about not realising I was in a city was approaching inner city Orlando and San Antonio, anyway. To a European eye, their inner cities are unbelievably spacious. It's largely down to the available space, of course, as you say (plus the lineage we've been talking about).