36 Cliftonville Road, Belfast, Co Antrim, BT14 6JY

36 Cliftonville Road is one of a semi-detached pair of derelict two-storey-over-basement villas with attic, designed and built around 1830 by the Belfast architect Thomas Jackson. It forms a pair with its neighbour at No. 34, and together the two houses represent a rare and early example of speculative suburban development in Belfast, built in a Greek Revival idiom and aimed at the city's rising mercantile and professional classes.

Jackson had trained in the Clifton area of Bristol and drew on that Regency character when laying out this development, which he named Cliftonville in direct reference to his time there. Numbers 34 and 36 were built as a semi-detached pair and, along with a terrace of three houses at Nos. 26–30, were the earliest structures in the development and are now the only survivors of what was originally approximately six structures, some subdivided into multiple dwellings. Jackson himself lived in a house to the left of Nos. 26–30, which has not survived. The current pair are plainer and more abstract than the terrace to the west, though they originally featured Regency ironwork porches, which are now lost. The buildings are shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1832–33, at which time they stood very much on the outskirts of Belfast in a largely rural landscape dotted with the substantial houses of the well-to-do.

The house is rectangular in plan, facing north with its central entrance on the west elevation. It sits on the south side of Cliftonville Road, set slightly back from the street on an urban plot. A drive to the east gives access to a large garden at the rear. The hipped roof is currently covered with a temporary roof covering and has a single brick chimney stack with clay pots at the centre of the building adjoining No. 34. The ogee-profile cast-iron rainwater goods — some of which have been removed — are supported on broad overhanging painted eaves decorated with guttae. The external walls are finished in ruled-and-lined render, which has fallen away in places to expose the red brick beneath. A continuous walkway around the basement appears to have been filled in.

Windows throughout are square-headed 6/6 timber sashes, most of which have been removed: ground floor openings are blocked and first floor openings are boarded. They sit within rendered reveals with painted stone sills unless otherwise noted. Attic-level openings, also boarded, have a continuous sill course and deep rendered panels.

The principal west elevation is symmetrical. It has a central opening, now boarded and fitted with a gate screen above, surmounted by a single window at first floor level. To the left and right are three two-storey elliptical-headed recesses, each containing one window at ground floor and one at first floor. At attic level there are three diminished openings with a continuous sill course and deep rendered panels. The north elevation has two openings at each floor, detailed as the west, and two diminished attic openings. The east elevation is abutted by No. 34. The south elevation mirrors the north. The site is currently enclosed to the north by temporary hoarding.

The Townland Valuation of 1837 records the occupier as William Herdman of Langtry and Herdman, shipowners and general merchants credited with bringing the first steamship into Belfast. He was an uncle of the Herdmans of Sion Mills. The valuation covers the house, basement, privy, stable and shed, with the combined valuation of this house and its neighbour set at £18 10s. By the time of Griffith's Valuation (1856–64), the occupier was Miss Agnes Herdman, who leased the property — by then valued at £42 — from a Catherine Rankin. By 1858 the Cave Hill tramway had improved access from Belfast city centre and six structures in the row are shown on the Ordnance Survey map of that date, the row now captioned Cliftonville.

The 1901 census records Thomas Watts, a corn merchant, living here with his mother, sister and niece, a general domestic servant, a nursemaid from County Monaghan, and a boarder, William Gunning, a travelling salesman. The house had eleven rooms and was designated first class. By 1911 the occupier was Archibald Chapman Husband from Renfrewshire, manager of a linen thread mill, living with seven of his ten children — an elder daughter and a son working as mercantile clerks, another son as a draughtsman — and, unusually for a professional man of his standing, no live-in servants. The house passed to a builder, George E. Hull, around 1920. From 1941 until the end of the Second World War it was used as an Air Raid Precautions (ARP) post. The ARP Scheme had operated in Belfast from 1938, dividing the city into 902 sectors of roughly 500 people each, requiring over five and a half thousand wardens to advise the public on risks and precautions, police the nightly blackout, and in some cases distribute ration books. Civil Defence headquarters were on the Lisburn Road; ARP posts were established throughout the city, some purpose-built and others, as here, occupying existing houses or shops. Posts in vulnerable areas were manned around the clock, others only at night.

From 1946 the house was home to Dr Hugh Shearman (born 1915), a historian and writer of fiction who also served as Chief Executive Officer of the Theosophical Society in Northern Ireland. His published works include A Bomb and a Girl (1948) and Ireland Since the Close of the Middle Ages (1955). Dr Shearman remained at the house until at least the late 1980s. The building suffered severe fire damage around 2003 and remains derelict.

Despite the loss of much historic fabric and detailing, the house retains architectural and historic distinction, bearing the hallmarks of Thomas Jackson's style. Together with No. 34 it forms a building of fine character and group value. Few examples of this Regency villa style survive, particularly in a group, and the pair represent an important early phase of Belfast's suburban development.