When land is costly, previously ignored little scraps of space suddenly take on a new value. So in London, where prices are soaring and every borough is under orders from mayor Ken Livingstone to pile in masses more housing, you find developers scrapping like ferrets over every backland plot. We are no strangers to tall, narrow houses in the capital. But just how narrow can a house be and still feel like a real house?
The answer is, very slender indeed. A new three-bedroom terraced house in Maida Vale by architects Boyarsky Murphy, built for Geoff MacCormack, a musician/producer, and his family, is just 9½ft wide at the front, while a tall, wafer-thin house in Clerkenwell, built in 2000 by architect Jo Hagan and now