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

Number 9 McMaster Street is a two-storey-with-attic, single-bay late Victorian terraced house, built around 1896 on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett district of East Belfast. It was developed by John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son, and forms part of a complete street of 37 late Victorian parlour houses built in several phases between 1899 and 1908. McMaster Street is the only late Victorian terrace in Belfast to have survived in reasonable original condition.

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles, a central rooflight window on the east slope, and 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 over an ovolo-moulded corbel course.

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

Windows are one-over-one timber sliding sashes. The entrance door is a replacement timber panelled door. Both windows and door are set within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and projecting masonry sills. Note that the current windows are described in the structural record as replacement uPVC.

The principal (east) elevation faces onto McMaster Street. The entrance is at the right and comprises the replacement timber panelled door with a square-headed transom light, accessed by a tiled threshold. A window sits to the left of the entrance. At first floor, two windows are offset slightly to the left. The north gable abuts Number 7 McMaster Street and the south gable abuts Number 11 McMaster Street. The rear elevation was not accessible at the time of inspection. It is enclosed by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling with a painted, vertically-sheeted timber entrance door at the centre, accessed via a narrow entry running north–south between the back yards of Parker Street and McMaster Street.

SETTING

The house sits at the north end of the west terrace and opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs. The street, formerly cobbled, is now largely concrete with small cobbled areas remaining at each end. Original lamp posts and electric light fittings survive (originally gas lights), and original tiled street name signs are present at the north and south ends of the street. The street narrows towards Major Street at the south.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

McMaster Street was built close to the Harland and Wolff shipyard on Queen's Island, which by 1900 was employing 9,000 men. The surrounding Ballymacarrett district — which in the mid-19th century had been an area of fields, cottages and mansions around an industrial core — became steadily built over with workers' terraces as Belfast grew into a significant world centre of shipbuilding, as well as a hub for ropeworks, linen manufacture, engineering and fertiliser production.

The street was built in several phases. Numbers 2 to 14, a row of two-and-a-half-storey houses, were in place by 1899. Numbers 1 to 11, also two-and-a-half storeys, are recorded in street directories for 1900, alongside notes of houses still under construction. By the time of the March 1901 census, numbers 1 to 35 were complete, and the remainder — numbers 16 to 52 — were added by 1908. The architects, John Fraser and Son, were active between the 1890s and 1910s and designed a number of similar terraced streets in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place.

The houses on the western side of the street first entered valuation records in 1900. They are of the parlour type and were built to a high specification that included running water and flush toilets — emerging technologies for workers' housing at the time. Building controls of the period required houses to have a rear entrance, a back yard, and a toilet. Gas was piped in for lighting, though electricity did not become commonplace until the 1930s, when lamp-lighters and window-tappers were still daily visitors to the street. Larger families tended to occupy the northern end of the street, where the houses include an attic storey.

Number 9 first appears in valuation records in 1900, when it was said to be four years old — though this appears to be an overestimate, as it was probably no more than two years old at the time. Along with numbers 1 to 11 (all houses and yards of two storeys plus attic, with a single-storey return), it was valued at £10 10s, later reduced to £9 10s, possibly on appeal. The house contained four bedrooms and a sitting room, was fitted with gas, and had an estimated construction cost of £105. Monthly rent was £1 8s 4d, or £17 per year before taxes.

The first recorded occupant was Samuel Thompson, a house painter who leased the property from the developer John McMaster. The 1901 census records him living there with his wife and five children aged between 15 and 28. His eldest son was an unemployed upholsterer; another son was an apprentice housepainter; and his daughters worked as linen weavers and a twine worker at local factories. A rapid succession of tenants followed: Robert Stewart, dairyman (1904); Samuel Smith, labourer (1907); Robert Clarke, clerk (1909); and by the 1911 census, J. A. Hewitt, an unemployed commercial traveller, who was living there with his wife, seven children, a son-in-law, and three boarders. The older daughters worked as spinners in the cotton works; the older boys worked in the shipyards as a holder-up and a heater boy; the son-in-law was a grain man, possibly at a nearby distillery; and the female boarders worked at the ropeworks as reelers and a stretcher.

By 1938 the house was occupied by J. Clarke, an insurance agent. During the German Blitz of 1941, Belfast suffered four air raids in April and May, during which over half the city's housing stock was damaged. McMaster Street was targeted during raids on 7/8 April and 4/5 May. The 1942 street directory records that most houses in the street, including Number 9, had been vacated, probably as a result of fire damage. By 1943, however, most residents — including J. Clarke — had returned. By 1947 the occupant was recorded as J. Clarke, boilermaker, possibly a son of the earlier resident, and he remained there until at least 1980.

In the 1970s, redevelopment in East Belfast led to the demolition of many of the other terraces in the area. In 1987, McMaster Street was listed, and in 1994 the area was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment. Two houses in the street have since been restored by Hearth.

SIGNIFICANCE

Number 9 has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street. It retains much of its original character, including polychromatic brick string courses and camber-headed window openings. The terrace as a whole is of significance as an example of housing designed under new planning and building regulations introduced at the turn of the 20th century with the aim of improving living standards for working-class people in Belfast, and as a surviving physical link with the city's industrial past.