Tiny Housefronts, Big Gardens

A DREAM ABOUT... PROPERTY TAX?

Yesterday night I had a dream in which I went back to my old house in London, which had been redeveloped by the landlord, but my friends were still staying there. In this dream, the entrance to the house was very tiny (as it has always been). But as i went up the stairs and with each successive floor, the house got bigger and bigger. There were now 5 levels to it. It was soon apparent that the top floor was the hugest floor, and the house must have been built in a sort of inverted pyramid.

When I got to the top floor, the logical explanation I came up with for this phenomenon in the dream world was that the houses were taxed by their footprint on the ground, ie: the land area the ground floor occupied, rather than plot ratio or the type of uses for the building (commercial/residential). So as a result, in the dream, people built houses with small ground floor areas and expanded vertically and horizontally on the higher floors.

I think the dream logic arises from my observation that residental flats in London seem to have very tiny house fronts but huge back gardens. I was told that the reason for such small housefronts facing roads was because some portion of the UK property-related tax (perhaps council tax, for maintaining roads and other public works) was calculated by how much of the house faced the main road. So a dream about houses with tiny footprints but larger floors when you went higher and higher was just a logical extension of this idea! (Funny how sometimes ideas come together only in dreams...)

Does anyone know more about property tax in the UK? So is it really responsible for affecting how houses have been built over there?