The end of West Terrace from The Greenspace
These gritstone back-to-back terraces off Shaw Lane in Milford were built by the Strutts in 1813 – 1820 and remain largely unchanged. They are seen as a fine example of good quality well designed housing for mill workers and are Grade II listed. They have been the subject of a detailed paper by Anthony Peers, published in “Transactions of the Ancient Monuments Society” in 2010, which can be seen in full here. This post is a summary of that paper.
East Terrace in 2026
Jedidiah Strutt bought the land the terraces stand on in 1792, around the time he built his houses in Milford on Hopping Hill, Chevin Road, Chevin Alley and Well Lane, but construction seems to have taken place later, in the period 1813-20. The steep terrain may have deterred The Strutts until then, when there was a “cotton boom” and high demand for housing for the extra workers.
The houses were built in the “back-to-back” design. In other industrial centres back-to-backs were built of brick in poor quality by speculative builders and by the 1840’s had become a by-word for Victorian squalor and disease. By the 1860’s many city councils banned the building of them and by 1909 they were banned nationally, and many have been demolished in slum clearance schemes.
East and West Terrace do not fit into this mould though. They were built to a high specification from the start. They were built of stone, either that quarried to create the basements of the houses themselves or from the quarry on Shaw Lane. The chimney stacks were built of brick, probably from Strutts own clay pits just north of Bridge View. Inside the rooms were well proportioned and the layout well designed, and all the houses in both East and West Terraces had generous gardens which were terraced.
This all said, by the 1920’s East & West Terrace were condemned unfit for human habitation, so in the 1930’s the Strutts upgraded the facilities indoors considerably. After the war they continued to upgrade, with the terraces completely re-roofed in the 1950’s and tiled fireplaces installed inside. By the 1960’s the Strutts began selling off all their housing in Milford, and by the end of the 1980’s all of the houses of East & West Terrace were in private hands.
