The Once and Future King?

Terraced homes. In parts of Bath, Cheltenham and Brighton, they are national monuments. In Edinburgh, Harrogate and London, town-houses are the des-res. In cities as diverse as Bristol, Cambridge, Leeds and Norwich, supply is exhausted of two-storey Victorian terraces waiting to be "discovered".

But outside cities, uniform rows arc up and down valleys of heavy industry, the cultural memory of back-to-backs, thankless working lives and, later, of jobless survival has scarred association. So scarred that of the 150 000 new homes built for market sale each year, those that are "terraced" are counted in hundreds - housebuilders won't even use the word because of perceived resistance.

Meanwhile in the Netherlands, Europe's other densely populated country where the terrace is often referred to as "English row houses", it shapes more than 50 per cent of new housing and its reduced land take helps Dutch developers to offer affordable low-cost home ownership.

Now we have Planning Policy Guidance note 3, and its requirement for more compact housing at not less than 30 to the hectare. Many housing associations' development standards already work to about 40 to the hectare, using terraces to achieve it. But PPG3 also instructs planning departments to target 50 homes per hectare for urban sites.

And then there is the recent Housing Corporation London region guidance to grant bidders warning that support is unlikely for new schemes that replace existing development with fewer homes than there were before.

There is a real concern over the incompatibility of density formulas and tenant choice. Some market-sale housebuilders tried to link Labour administrations past and present, arguing "homes fit for heroes" would be replaced by "rabbit hutches". Scaremongering provoked housing and planning minister Nick Raynsford to counter at the Town and Country Planning Association conference this summer: "I should stress that this government does not advocate tiny one-bed flats in dense urban areas as the solution to accommodating the rising numbers of smaller households. There has been some scurrilous reporting of PPG3.

That may be true, but the misreporting happened because the government had been slow to identify what should replace the semis they are squeezing out. A string of speeches by Raynsford finally pointed to London's Notting Hill or Islington, calling for more terraces, crescents squares and townhouses. Then July's Housing Design Awards recognised schemes that used such forms, affordable four-storey terraces in city centre locations such as London's Lambeth, and market sale four-storey townhouses on a greenfield site edging Bishops Stortford in Hertfordshire.

These terrace schemes are so few and far between that you can bet on seeing them again in best practice guidance, while architects and developers work out how best to fashion a new generation of good-sized accommodation at government-required densities. In the interim it is worth pointing out a trio of winning features that the terrace offers.

First, it has the potential to give everyone their own front door to the street. This has been at the heart of popular reaction to the Housing Design Award-winning scheme by architects Burrell Foley Fischer for Lambeth at Angell Town where terraces replaced blocks with shared-access and stairwells, rejected as institutionalised.

Angell Town demonstrates how a terrace can be subdivided into maisonettes, each with its own street entrance and private external yard or garden. The terrace is flexibly egalitarian, divisible into flats, maisonette or houses, all of which present roughly the same street face, making it too ambiguous for socio-economic pigeonholing.

Second, the repetitive nature of building a run of homes with identical front to back proportions allows construction teams to focus on making interior layouts flexible within the structural shell. This is at the heart of two schemes: Southern Housing Group's Nightingale estate in London's Hackney where a Dutch construction technique underpins extensive tenant choices within Life-Time Homes that address disabled access rights in three and four-storey homes; and urban planners and architects Shillam+Smith's designs for low-cost home ownership in Birmingham, Saltley and Small Heath's Single Regeneration Bid which proposes to allow occupants to choose the colour of exterior render, the positioning of fenestration and even to add storeys if required. Third, the terrace is a building form that has been done before and so its revival cannot end with the crushing discovery of failure. It is no architectural cul-de-sac.But the terrace has its Achilles' heel, sound penetration, and a new Building Regulation Part E Building Regulation is due in draft form this November to address it. The new Reg will tackle impact sound and introduce new methodology to cut low-frequency sound pollution from TV and music system bass speakers - something they didn't have in the terrace's Georgian or Victorian heydays.