THEY were sleeping rough in Salford last week - for the chance to buy one of 349 houses that are not even ready to move into yet.

And, no, these desirable residences-to-be weren't on one of those executive housing estates that are springing up in every spare corner of our towns and villages. These were Coronation Street terraces - literally so, as they featured in the soap's original credits.

Little Victorian houses side by side, as neat and uniform as on the day they were built. At least, they were on the outside. Inside, they'll have everything the modern young buyer could desire, from the sunken bath to the decking above the carport for sitting out on summer evenings. And all that at prices the first-time-buyer can afford.

What a pity there can't be more imaginative schemes like this. I know terraced houses aren't always ideal, especially if you have noisy neighbours. But isn't it so much better to renovate old houses and bring them up to modern standards than simply to abandon the old and build more and more of these new estates?

Everywhere, you see those yellow signs attached to lampposts pointing you in the direction of 'Priors Wood' or 'Bishops' Meadow'. They all sound as if they're set in some rural paradise, an olde worlde England that we all know never really quite existed.

There's even an 'Inglenook Close' somewhere, but I bet the houses aren't full of ancient beams and great open fireplaces beside which one can sit snugly gazing into the flames. It just sounds cosy.

People seem to like new houses, supposedly because they're troublefree. But try telling that to any number of new houseowners on these executive estates, faced with shoddy workmanship and endless teething troubles.

And why are they nearly all detached? It's a con anyway. "Detached", as often as not, means they have a metre or so between themselves and the next house, and a tiny patch of garden at the back. They're overlooked on all sides and can hear everything their neighbours are saying or doing whenever the windows are open. What's the difference between them and a terraced house, except the name?

Then there's the look of them. Not only do they all look exactly the same, but the style can at best be described as inoffensive. The despised terraced rows were always built in local materials - stone from nearby quarries, locally-made bricks. Wake up in the middle of one of these new estates and you could be anywhere between Land's End and John O'Groats.

There's rarely anything to mark them out as part of the area in which they stand. Builders seem to be so afraid of making a loss that they don't even try to build something good to look at.

Meanwhile, houses that have stood for a hundred years or more lie empty and derelict in streets and neighbourhoods that will eventually end up as demolition sites - on which, maybe, they'll build yet more executive estates. It doesn't make sense. It's wasteful of resources Part of the trouble is that VAT is levied on house renovation, but not on new building, so doing away with that anomaly would be one solution.

But best of all would be a few more builders with the imagination and far-sightedness of the Salford developers.