1 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

No. 1 Wellington Park Terrace is a mid-Victorian two-storey terraced house built in 1854, forming one half of a pair of semi-detached dwellings at the eastern end of Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast. It is an attractive example of its type, retaining most of its original features, and derives much of its significance from its unusual and distinctive group setting.

The house forms part of a terrace that looks out onto a semi-communal garden. The large, uninterrupted green space — free of driveways or paths — gives the setting a unique character. Principal pedestrian access for all houses is by a shared path running parallel to the front of the terrace; for some houses, including this one, this is the only route to the front door. Some houses also have access via a rear entry behind the north side of Eglantine Avenue.

The building is rendered and unpainted. The front entrance is framed by a stucco surround with a painted architrave capped by console brackets supporting a moulded projecting cornice. An undecorated frieze links the brackets beneath the cornice and forms the entrance lintel. The front door is a painted timber two-panel vertical design with bolection mouldings, with a simple rectangular fanlight above. The windows have no external mouldings and are fitted with sliding sash windows with horizontally divided two-over-two glazing and vertical margin panes. The roof has plain projecting eaves with a small fascia board and an ogee gutter. There are no dormers and no attic floor. The chimney is plain plastered with a simple square moulding and decorated yellow clay pots. The principal rear elevation retains its original sliding sash windows with horizontally divided two-over-two glazing. At ground floor level on the return and kitchen wing, a door opens into a small timber conservatory that has been recently added to the rear of the small yard on the east side of the return.

The house stands within a historically significant area of south Belfast whose development unfolded gradually over the second half of the 19th century. At the beginning of that century, the present Malone Road was the main route south from Belfast to Dublin, running along the Malone ridge. Long, narrow strip farms stretched westward from this road down towards the lower ground of the Bog Meadows. By the mid-18th century, many of these farms had been leased by the Donegall estate to Belfast merchants and worked by under-tenants. In 1819 the present Lisburn Road was laid out, cutting through the farms, and by 1839 the Ulster Railway had been driven through their lower fields. From 1823 onwards, the Donegall estate began granting perpetual leases on land to the south of Belfast, and with the unity of the Malone farms broken, the area opened up to developers.

The first phase of development was modest and genteel — small country villas with spacious gardens occupying former farm strips between the Malone and the new Lisburn Road. These included Fountainville Cottage, Elm Wood (roughly where the Queen's University Students' Union now stands), Vermont (on the site of the present Methodist College), Wellington Park Cottage, Eglantine Hill, Windsor, and Derryvolgie. From the later 1840s and 1850s, following the establishment of Queen's College nearby and the beginnings of Belfast's merchant classes moving out of the town centre, portions of these properties' grounds began to be sold off for groups of relatively grand terraced and semi-detached dwellings. The development of Wellington Park and Wellington Park Terrace was part of this expansion, which over the following forty years or so produced the University and Malone area suburbs seen today.

Research by Stephen Carleton has established that nos. 1 and 3 Wellington Park Terrace — the earliest houses in the terrace — were built in 1854. The valuation of 1858 records them as occupied by Frances Ogilby (no. 1) and William Ferguson (no. 3), both properties leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22 each. Nos. 9 to 15 followed between 1858 and 1860, built by John Lowry, a watchmaker with premises in High Street, who held the lease of their plot from George Tate, a timber merchant and major local landholder after whom Tate's Avenue is named. Lowry himself was the first occupant of no. 9; no. 11 was first occupied by Henrietta Walsh, no. 13 by James S. Sheerer, and no. 15 by Andrew Munce, each valued at £13. No. 15, at the then-western end of the block, appears originally to have been entered via a porch to the gable. In 1862 Lowry subdivided the land to the rear of these houses, which had been recorded as being in pasture, and sub-let it to Nathaniel Greer, who by the end of the following year had built the present nos. 24 and 26 Wellington Park. Nos. 5 to 7 were subsequently built by Lowry again, while a Thomas Frazer was responsible for nos. 17 to 21. The precise dating is uncertain, but analysis of handwriting styles and ink colours in the valuations suggests all may have been in place by 1869. The street directory of 1870 appears to list only six houses, though all eleven properties appear in the directory of 1877. A Belfast City Corporation minute of 1874 uses the name Wellington Park Terrace, suggesting the full terrace was present by that date.

At some point after the building of nos. 17 to 21, no. 15 was extended to connect with no. 17, creating an unbroken terrace from no. 3 to no. 21. This work might be assumed to have been carried out around 1869, when no. 17 was built, but the valuations make no mention of any such extension prior to at least 1883, and a gap is shown in the terrace on Marcus Ward and Co.'s maps of Belfast from 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of those maps has been questioned, as they also fail to show nos. 5 to 7. The detailing to the door screen appears to post-date 1880, though it may have been altered at a later stage. It has been suggested that the terrace was originally conceived as part of a planned square, but the historical evidence points instead to piecemeal development by different individuals with no single overarching scheme. The large garden of Eglantine Hill to the immediate south remained largely untouched until the later 1880s and would have prevented any such grander plan. When those grounds were eventually sold off, the developers found it more convenient to create a new broad thoroughfare — the present Eglantine Avenue — to the south, which is why the terrace now sits between two larger terraces rather than forming part of a formal square.

The house remains in use as a private dwelling within a designated conservation area.