Tyneside flat

Tyneside flats are a form of UK domestic housing found primarily on Tyneside, including in Newcastle upon Tyne, Gateshead, South Tyneside and North Tyneside. The first known example of this type was constructed in the 1860s.^[1]

They are pairs of single-storey flats within a two-storey terrace, a common type of Victorian housing in urban England. Their distinctive feature is their use of two separate front doors onto the street, each door leading to a single flat.^[2] The upper flat has a stairway leading from directly behind its front door, the other has a hallway beneath this, with the space below the stairway forming a small storage space. From the outside, the two front doors appear in adjacent pairs between the houses' windows.

In contrast, many similar flats, elsewhere in England, have a single shared front door, which opens into a communal lobby with interior doors to each flat.^[3]

Housing of this period was often constructed as a local mixture of two-storey terraced houses, and single-storey Tyneside flats. The paired doors are the only external indicator of which type a building is. There is usually a single upstairs window spanning both doors.