Wall-to-wall misery recalled as 'Rat Pee Terrace' gets facelift

The National Trust, custodian of Britain's historic houses and rural tearooms, yesterday unveiled the £1m restoration of a dilapidated terrace of 170-year-old houses as part of a move away from rose-covered heritage towards gritty social reality.

The "back-to-back'' houses in Inge Street, central Birmingham – the description derives from the way they were built, two deep with a shared rear wall – are prime examples of their kind. Hundreds of thousands were built in cities across Britain for factory workers during the industrial revolution.

The Inge Street houses, grouped around a courtyard with shared washing facilities, are the last of 40,000 back- to-backs that survived in Birmingham until the slum clearances of the 1950s.

The National Trust, which is working with the Birmingham Conservation Trust on the restoration after receiving a £622,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund, said it faced a delicate task in ensuring an accurate account of working life in Inge Street.

A former resident, Betty Green, 82, has disturbing memories of her childhood there. Her parents relied on food handouts and tensions in the household ran high. "I used to run outside and sleep in the alley that's still here. I'd find a piece of sacking and sleep with the rats running over me," she recalled. "I stood in that alley today. It still smells of rats and rat pee. There was a special smell caused by the bugs, a sweet smell. This place was purgatory."

The Birmingham scheme is the latest in a number of social history projects by the National Trust. It is restoring a 19th century workhouse in Nottinghamshire and a Chartist cottage in Worcestershire.