In praise of the suburban semi

In 1939 George Orwell took aim at burgeoning British suburbia and its population of lower middle class lackeys in his novel Coming Up for Air, memorably describing the new homes being built on the fringes of cities as ‘semi-detached torture chambers where the poor little five-to-ten pound a-weekers quake and shiver’.

More than eight decades on and the Office for National Statistics reports that one in three of us lives in a semi-detached home, an architectural style with a far longer and more interesting history than Orwell may have been aware of. They are also – officially – the hottest property type on the market.

Analysis of more than 100,000 house sales over the past year by sales firm Property Solvers found that semis took an average of 150 days to sell. Terraces took 152 days to go through the same process, and detached houses averaged 155 days. Flats trailed the pack, taking 176 days to shift.

Experts believe that a large part of the appeal of the semi is its in-between status – cheaper than a detached home in these straitened times, but less doll’s-house in scale than traditional terraces.