What exactly is a "building" in Britain?

Question

My question relates specifically to multi-storey residential buildings with several flats on each floor. Not necessarily high-rises or a "block of flats". An example would be the following one I found on Google Maps in Glasgow:

As you can see in the picture there are several doors that are each designated a different address - 19 Crathie Dr, 21 Crathie Dr, 23 Crathie Dr, etc. My question is: how would you refer to each of these? Is 19 Crathie Dr considered one building, and 21 Crathie Dr a different building? Or if everything is considered one whole building what do you call these separate sections?

Answer 1

I would consider the whole construction to be a building, and the individual doors can just be referred to as doors or entrances. The different sections of the building accessible by each entrance could be considered partitions of the building.

If I was directing someone, I'd tell them "go to the next door", or "find door number 26 of X building". I think that considering the whole block as a group of separate buildings would be more confusing. Visually, it is a unitary object.

Hospitals and terraced houses can provide some perspective.

Hospitals are generally made up of multiple detached buildings, which can be called "X building", and "Y building", (named buildings), but they may also have many different wards within the building, and many different entrances to each building. Those would generally also be named. But each unitary physical object is still considered a building.

With terraced houses, multiple families live in the one building, but that building consists of multiple (numbered) houses, each referred to individually by its name or number.

Answer 2

Each street address (19 Crathie Dr, 21 Crathie Dr and so on) can be referred to as a tenement. The problem is that, as can be seen from the Lexico definition under the link, that tenement can also be used for an individual flat. It is interesting that Glasgow City Council quotes the "Tenenments (Scotland) Act 2004" which defines a tenement in the Scottish setting as a building divided into flats rather than an individual flat.

There are various conventions used to provide postal addresses to individual flats within a tenement including "19/1 Craithie Dr" and "1F1 19 Crathie Dr" for the ground floor flat behind street door 19 on Crathie Dr although it seems that these conventions can cause problems paricularly when English based utility companies encounter them.

Your photo looks as though it shows a row of traditional Glasgow sandstone tenements. At one time most of these were regarded as poor housing but many of the better ones are quite sought after now.

Answer 3

In certain cities and countries where buildings tend to be attached to each other, it can be difficult to tell where one of the buildings in a row ends and another begins, especially when all the facades are uniform, as is the case with this Scottish apartment block. I would imagine the buildings in Britain have numbers on their front doors or walls that differentiate one building from the adjacent ones. The building or buildings in the above photo is\are tenements. In Scottish English, a 'tenement' is a traditional stone apartment house, usually low-rise, with a small shared foyer, staircases and relatively narrow corridors. Like their counterparts in the rest of the UK and certain North American cities like NYC, tenements in Scotland were typically working class housing, but unlike tenements elsewhere, the Scottish ones have never had the same reputation for being rundown slums.

Answer 4

The technical term for the building in the photo above is a "tenement", which is simply a type of apartment block where the individual units on each floor share the common stairwell that lands on that level and the corridor which connects all the apartments in that section of the building on that floor level. The term " tenement " comes from the fact that the whole building is (or was) owned by a single entity that rents out the apartments. So 'tenement' primarily refers to the building's ownership structure \ housing tenure. It's similar to how some apartment buildings and complexes in North America are called "condominiums" (the apartments within the building are also called condominiums, or condos for short). Condominium is an ownership structure by which individual units in a multi unit building or complex come under the ownership of separate entities, which come together to form an association or board that runs and maintains the communal areas of the building and any surrounding grounds, for which unit owners pay regular fees. A less common housing tenure that apartments can be under is the housing co-operative. In a housing co-op, each resident buys into the organization that owns the entire development. Residents of cooperative developments actually don't own their dwellings, instead, they own shares in the co-op board, to whom they pay rent-like fees.