Townhouse (Great Britain)

British property developers and estate agents often market new buildings as townhouses, following the North American usage of the term, to aggrandise modest dwellings and to avoid the negative connotation of cheap terraced housing built in the Victorian era to accommodate workers.

In concept, the aristocratic townhouse is comparable to the hôtel particulier, which notably housed the French nobleman in Paris, as well as to the urban domus of the nobiles of Ancient Rome.

They gradually spread onto the Strand, the main ceremonial thoroughfare from the City to the Palace of Westminster, where parliamentary and court business were transacted.

The Strand had the advantage of frontage to the River Thames, which gave the nobles their own private landing places, as had the royal palaces of Whitehall and Westminster and further out from the City Greenwich and Hampton Court.

The final fashion before the modern era was for a residence on the former marsh-land of Belgravia, on the southern part of the Grosvenor Estate, developed after the establishment of Mayfair by the Duke of Westminster.

Many aristocratic townhouses were demolished or ceased to be used for residential purposes after the First World War, when the scarcity and greater expense of domestic servants made living on a grand scale impractical.