In Melbourne, during the boom years of the 1880s, speculators took advantage of the demand for housing and reduced large crown allotments to long, narrow house sites and built rows of closely-spaced, two-storey houses. Hundreds of terrace houses like this one in Victoria Avenue were built in suburbs such as Fitzroy, Collingwood, Carlton, South Melbourne, Parkville, South Yarra and East Melbourne. Some terrace houses were built in couples or groups of three, four and six. Others were built individually and inserted between larger terraces. Parapets and stuccoed urns, elaborate cast iron lace to balustrades, and verandas were the fancy fronts to these houses. They concealed a street scape behind of back lanes, bluestone cobbles, corrugated iron fences, and unpainted Hawthorn bricks. The terrace house became the characteristic house type of the inner suburbs.

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