12 McMaster Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT5 4HP

No. 12 McMaster Street is a two-storey-with-attic, single-bay late Victorian terraced house built around 1896–1898 by developer John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son, situated on the east side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast. It forms part of a complete and largely intact late Victorian terraced street and has group value with the other listed buildings on McMaster Street.

EXTERIOR

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles. A central rooflight window sits on the west slope, and there is a modern red brick chimney stack at the south side. Painted ogee-profile cast-iron rainwater goods are supported on a projecting polychromatic brick eaves course, itself sitting on an ovolo-moulded corbel course; uPVC downpipes are also present to the rear.

The walls are built in English garden-wall bond — red brick laid with alternating courses of headers and stretchers — and feature three polychromatic brick string courses, including a continuous brick-and-sill course at first-floor level, with decorative polychromatic brickwork detailing above the first-floor windows. All of this polychromatic brickwork has been painted, with the exception of the detailing above the first-floor windows.

Windows are replacement square-headed 1-over-1 timber sliding sashes, and the entrance door is a replacement timber-panelled glazed door with a square-headed transom light. Both windows and door are set within camber-headed openings with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs and projecting masonry sills.

The principal (west) elevation has the entrance door to the left, accessed via an original tiled threshold, flanked by a window to the right, with two windows at first-floor level offset slightly to the right. The north gable abuts No. 10 McMaster Street and the south gable abuts No. 14 McMaster Street.

The rear (east) elevation is partly abutted on the right by a sympathetic two-storey extension with a pitched roof and uPVC rainwater goods, added around 2000. The remainder of the rear elevation was not accessible or visible at the time of inspection.

SETTING

No. 12 sits at the north end of the east terrace (the two-storey-with-attic block) and faces directly onto McMaster Street. The wide street was formerly cobbled and is now largely concrete surfaced, with small cobbled areas remaining at each end. The house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs and original lamp posts that originally carried gas lighting and now carry electric fittings. Original tiled street name signs are present at the north and south ends of the street. The rear of the property is enclosed by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling, entered through a painted vertically-sheeted timber door at the centre, accessed via a narrow entry running north–south between the back yards of Lendrick Street and McMaster Street. The street narrows towards Major Street at the south.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

No. 12 McMaster Street first appears on the third edition of the Ordnance Survey map for Belfast, published in 1902, which shows that only nos. 6 to 14 had been constructed on the eastern terrace at that time. Belfast Street Directories confirm that the western terrace (nos. 1–37) was constructed in 1898, while the remainder of the eastern terrace (nos. 16–52) was not added until 1908, meaning nos. 6–14 on the east side preceded the western terrace by approximately one year.

The land on which the street stands was owned by John McMaster, who held the south side of the Newtownards Road. Because the plot was wedge-shaped, the terraces became progressively narrower and the rear yards progressively smaller as building moved toward the far end of the street. No. 12 is therefore among the largest houses on the street and retains one of the larger yards.

The Belfast revaluation of 1900 recorded No. 12 as a two-storey house with attic, measuring 13.6 feet wide by 25 feet deep and 24 feet in height, fitted with gas lighting, and costing an estimated £131 to construct. In 1899 the property was valued at £10 10s. The first recorded occupant was Thomas Murphy, a carpenter, who rented the house from John McMaster at a monthly rent of £1 8s. 4d. (£17 annually). The 1901 Census Building Return classified it as a first-class dwelling with eight rooms; by the 1911 Census it had been reclassified as a second-class house with seven rooms, a reclassification repeated across nos. 6–14.

By 1907 the house had passed to Robert Calvert, a Methodist shopkeeper who had previously lived next door at No. 14, and whose son — like many residents on the street — worked in the local shipyards as an apprentice blacksmith. By 1918 the house had passed to Robert Drysdale, employed as a boatman in the yards, who continued to reside there until at least the 1960s, by which time he was working as a fitter. The property value remained at £10 10s. through the end of the Annual Revisions in 1930, rising to £14 10s. by the First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland in 1935. Ownership of the street had passed from John McMaster to an L. McMaster (an unknown relative) by the time of the Second General Revaluation, though the assessed value of No. 12 was unchanged between 1956 and 1972. After Robert Drysdale vacated around 1970, a succession of different occupants lived at the address over the following three decades.

The terraces on McMaster Street were among the first late Victorian industrial workers' houses in Belfast to be built to new housing and planning regulations specifically designed to improve living standards for working-class people. They were among the earliest such terraces in the city to be supplied with running water and flushable toilets, made possible by the construction of a new city drainage system, and gas lighting was piped into each house from the outset — amenities that distinguished the street markedly from the more squalid early Victorian housing typical of the area. Electricity was not introduced to the street until the 1930s. The architect J. Frazer (active from the 1890s to the second decade of the 20th century) also designed other comparable terraced streets in Belfast, including Chadwick Street (built 1899) and Meadowbank Place, both of which are similar in design to McMaster Street.

McMaster Street escaped damage during the 1941 Belfast Blitz, when the Luftwaffe targeted the Belfast shipyards and caused widespread destruction to buildings and residential terraces along the Newtownards Road. During the 1970s much of the Ballymacarrett area was extensively redeveloped and many comparable red brick terraces were demolished. McMaster Street survived intact and was recognised as a valuable remnant of late Victorian working-class housing: No. 12 was listed in 1987 along with the rest of the terrace, and in 1994 the neighbourhood was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment, with criteria established to ensure that any additions to the terrace would be sympathetic to the original design and fabric of the street.