Tyneside flat

Tyneside flats are a form of domestic housing found in England, primarily on Tyneside, i.e. Newcastle, Gateshead and on Wearside in the Sunderland areas.

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. 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 house's 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.

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.

Tyneside flats may vary in size, usually having one or two bedrooms as the lower flat is made slightly smaller by the staircase to upstairs. Some upper flats use the attic space for additional bedrooms and may have three or four bedrooms, spread over two floors, and usually with a dormer window to the front.

The terrace was extended to the rear by an outshot, a typical feature for Victorian terraces, containing a scullery. As was typical for their time, each flat has a small enclosed yard at the rear with an outside toilet or 'netty' . For the upstairs flat, rear access would be by an open brick staircase. Compared to the yard of a similar house, the two yards are thus quite small, being half the size, and containing two privies rather than one.

Originally the kitchen was the largest central room, containing a cast iron coal range for cooking, and a smaller scullery was provided in the rear outshot. Water was only provided in this scullery, with a Belfast sink and often a separate stove heating a wash copper for laundry. With the adoption of smaller gas cookers rather than coal ranges in the mid-20th century, many of these sculleries were converted as kitchens, so allowing the previous kitchen as a larger living room.

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