College Green House, College Green, Belfast, BT7 1LN

College Green House is a fine high Victorian corner house built in 1870, designed by James F MacKinnon of 11 Arthur Street, civil engineer and architect, for Archibald McCollum of Skipper Street. It was conceived as part of a single development together with nos. 2 and 4 College Green (then part of Fitzroy Avenue), all three houses sharing common stables and many architectural details. The building relates closely in period and style to the Union Theological College and the rest of College Green terrace, and its architectural and historic character is sufficient to warrant listed status, despite unsympathetic alterations to one elevation.

The house is roughly cubical in form, three storeys of red brick on a stone plinth with cream sandstone trims, and is covered by a hipped slate roof. It occupies a corner position, with elevations facing both College Green and Botanic Avenue.

BOTANIC AVENUE ELEVATION

The original entrance front, this elevation remains fairly intact. It is an asymmetrical three-storey, three-bay composition on a stone plinth, with several stone bands and moulded string courses at first-floor cill level and at the shoulders of the first- and second-floor windows. The ground floor features paired round-headed windows in the outer bays and a central doorcase, all with sandstone trims. The doorcase projects forward of the elevation and is carried on round columns with free Corinthian capitals; it has a central carved rosette, quatrefoils at the sides, and dogtooth ornament around the recessed door opening. Faint traces of painted lettering reading "COLLEGIATE SCHOOL" can still be made out over two of the ground-floor windows. First-floor windows are segmental-headed with stone heads paired under hood mouldings; the openings are chamfered at the sides and head. At second-floor level, the windows take the form of aediculed dormers with gabled heads bearing rosettes, set forward of the wall on stone columns and breaking through the eaves. Double-hung sash windows are used throughout. The projecting eaves are carried on ornamental corbels on a small moulded string course, and cast iron ogee guttering survives along part of the eaves. A single-bay brick extension of around 1930 has been added against the left-hand end of the building, rising the full height of the house.

COLLEGE GREEN ELEVATION

This elevation was unsympathetically altered during flat conversion works in the 1930s. It is an asymmetrical three-storey elevation that originally had similar details to the Botanic Avenue front, but with a canted ground-floor bay on the left and a central round-headed doorcase. The canted bay retains stone mullions with palmate capitals and an ornamental corbel under the gutter, with a slate roof with lead ridges. Modern horizontal mullioned casement windows have been inserted at first- and second-floor levels and the original openings bricked up. String courses at first-floor level and a cornice at the eaves match the neighbouring houses in College Green. The original drawings held at Belfast City Hall indicate that this elevation originally had a two-bay arrangement echoing the Botanic Avenue side, with paired mullioned first-floor windows and two paired dormers matching the central Botanic Avenue dormer; these stone dormers are now lost.

REAR ELEVATION

The partly altered three-storey brick rear elevation has a small three-storey return at the Botanic Avenue corner and a small single-storey return at the left-hand end, the latter replacing the original scullery return. Most windows are original double-hung sashes, either plain or horizontally divided. The central first-floor staircase landing window has margined panes, and there is a later mullioned window above it.

ROOF

The roof is covered in Bangor blue slates, hipped, with what appear to be lead ridges and a central flat portion. There is a truncated brick chimney on the College Green elevation and two stone-corbelled brick chimneys on the Botanic Avenue elevation, matching a similar chimney at the junction with 2 College Green.

OUTBUILDINGS AND SITE

A dwarf brick wall runs around two sides of the building, with chamfered stone coping and bases for pillars at intervals; the railings are now missing. To the rear stand the coach house and stables serving this house and nos. 2 and 4 College Green.

The coach house is a tall single-storey red-brick building with its gable facing Botanic Avenue. The gable has stone trim and kneelers, a circular stone blind oculus, and a wrought iron finial. Later sheeted double doors have been fitted. The side elevations facing the mews lane and yard are of older brick. A double door has been inserted asymmetrically into the rear gable facing the yard, replacing a former WC and coal store. The roof is slated with cast iron half-round gutters.

The harness room and stables form a two-storey building in old red brick, linked by a matching wall to the coach house. Windows are generally on the yard side. On the mews side there is one barred blocked-up window at ground level and a sheeted first-floor hoist door, along with several ornamental cast iron vents at first-floor level.

ALTERATIONS AND HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT

College Green was first laid out as part of Fitzroy Avenue around 1866. The original drawings, dated August 1870 and held among the earliest records in the Belfast City Hall bye-law archive, show a ground-floor plan and part sections for the three houses as a single development. The ground landlord for the area was William Corry, and McCollum acquired freehold title under a Fee Farm Grant dated 8 September 1870.

Archibald McCollum, a general broker and commission merchant, occupied the house from 1871, when it was listed as 76 Botanic Avenue. The original entrance was from Botanic Avenue, with a fireplace in the hall and the staircase rising from an alcove off the hall towards the centre of the house; there was no door to College Green at that time.

By the 1877 street directory the building was known as Culfeightrin House, and by 1880 it had become a Church of Ireland Collegiate School, with the Reverend W J Butler as principal, succeeded by John Jackson. The traces of the "Collegiate School" lettering still visible on the Botanic Avenue stonework date from this period. In April 1881 the house, offices and yard were valued at £72.

In 1890 the house reverted to private occupancy as the home of John MacCormac, MD LRCP&S, physician to the Belfast Institution for Nervous Diseases Paralysis and Epilepsy. In 1891, following mortgage proceedings, the property was conveyed to John McConnell, a director of Messrs Dunville & Co, who renamed it College Green House. He lived there until his death in March 1928, after which his widow remained until around 1931. In 1932 the street number changed from 76 to 106 Botanic Avenue.

In 1933, McConnell's executors sold the house to William Bellamy James, Annie Mary James, and Walter Joseph James. In 1934 the address changed to 1 College Green and the house was subdivided into six flats. The conversion was carried out by T R Eager RIBA for William James of Great Victoria Street. Eager's existing drawings at the time of conversion indicate that the staircase had already been moved to its present position parallel to Botanic Avenue; since the entrance was still from Botanic Avenue at that point, it is possible this was in fact the original staircase location. Eager was responsible for the extensive alterations to the College Green elevation, including the creation of a new entrance there and the reduction of the original parlour to form a new hall. He also added the small three-storey extension between the house and the coach house.

At the end of 1934, Eager submitted further plans to convert the coach house and stables, but this was not executed. The following year there was a further application for a concrete floor over the garages, which was also not carried out. In 1944, S Galbraith of 24 Arthur Street was commissioned to move the double doors from the elevation of the coach house facing the main house into the Botanic Avenue gable, with a pair of rolled steel joists set in concrete over the head of the new opening.

HISTORICAL AND CULTURAL ASSOCIATIONS

John McConnell, who owned the house from 1891 until his death in 1928, had a long career with Dunville's Distillery, becoming Managing Director under James Craig (father of Lord Craigavon, first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland). He was a Freemason, a JP, and representative of Alabama to the Grand Lodge of Britain in Ireland, and a generous patron of the Masonic Schools in Dublin. The family kept a car in the coach house and employed a chauffeur, George, who had originally served as a coachman. A family Aga, gifted by American Freemasons after McConnell's wife admired one during a visit to the United States, stood in the kitchen. In 1927, at the age of 82, McConnell flew from London to Paris and back within 48 hours. James Craig, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, sent his condolences on McConnell's death in March 1928; given that the Northern Ireland Parliament met in the nearby Presbyterian College from September 1921 until Stormont was built, it is considered likely that Craig called on McConnell there during that period.

McConnell's youngest daughter, Mabel Washington McConnell, born on 4 July 1884, attended Victoria College and graduated from Queen's University with a BA in 1906. She became involved in the Gaelic League, the suffragette movement, and socialist politics. In 1909 she served as temporary secretary to George Bernard Shaw for several months, and in March 1911 she did secretarial work for George Moore. In 1910 she met Desmond FitzGerald (1888–1947) in London. FitzGerald had been part of a London literary group — the Tour Eiffel group — with T E Hulme, F S Flint, Florence Farr, Joseph Campbell and others, the English Imagists to whom Ezra Pound was introduced by FitzGerald and Farr in 1908. Mabel and Desmond spent Christmas 1913 at College Green House and had tea with James Connolly after a Republican meeting. Desmond FitzGerald went on to become a senior figure in the Irish independence movement, serving as Minister for Publicity and later Minister for External Affairs and Minister for Defence in W T Cosgrave's government. He attended the London Treaty negotiations at the end of 1921 and brought the text of the treaty back to Dublin. In January 1922, attending the Celtic Race Conference in Paris, he called on James Joyce and suggested his name be put forward for the Nobel Prize for Literature, an episode Joyce later hinted at in a passage in Finnegans Wake. Their fourth and youngest son, Garret FitzGerald, born in 1926, later became Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland. His mother's and grandparents' connections with Presbyterian Belfast are considered to have been an influence on his politics. A photograph of the house taken around the turn of the century, provided by Garret FitzGerald through his niece Jennifer, has served as a key source for the restoration of the building.

From September 1921 until Stormont was built, Northern Ireland's Parliament met in the Presbyterian College overlooked by College Green House.

During the period when the building has been divided into flats it has been occupied by a significant number of artists and writers. Alfred Armentiers Kitchener Arnold, MBE — a civil servant who was heavily involved in the artistic life of Belfast, particularly ballet and theatre, and who maintained an unusually large collection of classical records — occupied the top-floor flat by 1954. His flat was a focus for visiting dancers and theatre people; regular visitors included the painters George McCann, Mercy Hunter, and Dan O'Neill, and Louis MacNeice is also recorded to have visited. The architect Henry Lynch Robinson, responsible for restoring Kelly's Cellars and designing numerous modernist buildings, is said to have lived and died in the house. The writer John D Stewart was among the other notable residents.

In the 1990s the house was occupied largely by groups of artists, photographers, painters, and conceptual artists, including Martin Wedge, James Millar, Peter Richards, Alice Maher, Phil Collins, Eoghan McTigue, and the artist Susan Philipsz, who lived there for six or seven years. In May 1998 Philipsz, through her Grassy Knoll Productions, organised an exhibition entitled Rev Todd's Full House, bringing together work by approximately fifty artists who had connections with the building. The event was recorded by Bill Drummond in his book "45", in which he describes the house as a "crumbling, three storey, red brick Victorian town house" with "no central heating, nothing that could be described as a mod con" and "sacks of coal split and spilling outside the doors of the six flats." The house also appeared in the 1990s film adaptation of Divorcing Jack. At the time of listing the artist Rita Duffy had a caretaker role for the house with a working studio based within it.