3-39, Ellacombe Road

A terrace of 37 houses, likely dating to the 1870s, situated along Ellacombe Road in Torquay. The terrace was designed by JW Rowell and constructed following the opening up of the Ellacombe Valley by Sir Lawrence Palk, intended as dwellings for working men. The construction uses snecked local grey limestone rubble with brick dressings, largely painted over, and slate roofs. Stacks feature brick shafts with corbelled cornices, now mostly rendered.

The buildings are arranged in pairs, each with a single-depth block, one room wide, and front doors in the centre. Each pair has a projecting rear service wing at right angles, dividing between the houses; some of these wings retain end stacks. The terrace is two storeys high, with some properties having basements at the lower end of the slope. The pairs alternate between those with gables to the front and those with gabled dormers. Each house has steps leading to a front door with a crank-headed fanlight, along with a 3-light transomed ground-floor window with brick quoins, also with a cranked arch, and a 2-light similar window on the first floor, also crank-headed. Window and door alterations have occurred. Original front doors were either 4-panel or vertical boarding. Original windows are high transomed casements with planted chamfered mouldings, and the original chimney pots have plain glazed cylinders. Number 26 is a shop with a symmetrical shopfront dating from the late 19th or early 20th century, featuring pilasters with incised Greek key decoration, a fascia with a cornice, a recessed shop door, and a low panel. Carved heads appear on the key blocks of numbers 33, 35 and 37.

The interior has not been inspected. The terrace, when considered alongside a similar group in Princes Road, forms part of an exceptionally well-planned and designed group of mid-19th-century workers' housing.