7 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

7 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house, built between 1860 and 1879, that retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting within a conservation area.

The house is one of a terrace of six mid-Victorian two-storey dwellings with dormered roofs, numbered 5 to 15, which look out onto semi-communal gardens. Some houses have rear access onto the entry at the back of the north side of Eglantine Avenue, but for all houses the principal pedestrian approach is by way of a shared path running parallel to the front of the terrace — for some houses, this is the only means of reaching the front door. The large, semi-communal green space, uninterrupted by driveways or paths, gives a unique character to the setting of the terrace as a whole.

The front elevation is fair-faced brick laid in Flemish bond, using red brick with colour variations that produce an attractive brindled appearance. The end houses have quoins (lost on No. 15), and the central house, No. 11, also has quoins, creating a slightly skewed but unified composition across the terrace front.

The front entrance to No. 7 has a stucco surround with narrow pilasters on each side of the door, rising to large console brackets that support a moulded projecting cornice. An undecorated frieze links the brackets beneath the cornice and forms the entrance lintel. Above the cornice, a curious flat plaster pediment completes the entrance surround. The front door itself is a four-panel painted timber design with bolection mouldings: the lower two panels are solid, and the upper two are glazed with three-centred arched heads matching the adjacent window. Above the door is a simple rectangular fanlight.

The ground floor front window has a moulded stucco surround with a three-centred shallow arched head. The fenestration is a sliding sash with glazing horizontally divided into two over two panes. The first-floor window openings are plainer, with painted reveals and brick flat-arched heads, and are also fitted with timber sliding sash windows with two over two glazing.

At eaves level, a flat plain painted frieze four courses deep is surmounted by a square-section projecting cornice carrying an ogee cast-iron gutter. The cornice is decorated with four pairs of simple rectangular modillions. The roof has a modern square fully glazed dormer running the full width of the house, with a flat roof and a PVC downpipe; the dormer cheeks are slate-hung. The chimneys are plain plastered with a simple square moulded cornice and decorated yellow clay pots.

The rear elevation has been rendered. The ground floor principal rear wall retains large sliding sash windows with six over six glazing. The return and kitchen at ground floor level were not inspected.

The historical background to the terrace and its neighbourhood is well documented. At the beginning of the 19th century, the present Malone Road was the main route south from Belfast to Dublin, running along the Malone ridge and twisting south-west towards Lisburn. Stretching westwards from this road were long, narrow strip farms sloping down towards the lower ground of the Bog Meadows. In the mid-18th century, many of these farms were leased by the Donegall estate to Belfast merchants and farmed by under-tenants whose largely humble farmhouses were scattered along the road. In 1819 the present Lisburn Road was laid out, cutting through the farms, and by 1839 the Ulster Railway had been cut through their lower fields. From 1823 onwards, perpetual leases began to be granted by the Donegall estate for land to the south of Belfast, and with the unity of the Malone farms thus destroyed, the area became open to developers.

The first wave of development was relatively modest and decidedly gentrified, taking the form of small country villas surrounded by spacious gardens, many occupying the former farm strips between the Malone and the new Lisburn Road. Among these, travelling southwards, were Fountainville Cottage (near today's Fountainville Avenue), Elm Wood (roughly where Queen's University Belfast's Students' Union now stands), Vermont (on the site of the present Methodist College), Wellington Park Cottage (in the present Wellington Park area), Eglantine Hill (in the present Eglantine Avenue area), Windsor and Derryvolgie (around what are now Windsor and Derryvolgie Avenues respectively).

In the later 1840s and 1850s, following the establishment of Queen's College nearby and the beginnings of the movement of Belfast's rising merchant classes out of the town centre, portions of the grounds of many of these properties began to be sold off for the building of groups of relatively grand terraced and semi-detached dwellings. The development of Wellington Park and Wellington Park Terrace formed part of this expansion, which over the course of the following forty years led to the establishment of the suburbs of the University and Malone area as they exist today.

Research by Stephen Carleton has established that Nos. 1 and 3 of what was to become Wellington Park Terrace were built in 1854, and are recorded in the valuation of 1858 as occupied by a Frances Ogilby (No. 1) and William Ferguson (No. 3), both properties leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22. Annotations within the same valuation book show that Nos. 9 to 15 were built between 1858 and 1860. The man responsible for their construction was John Lowry, a watchmaker with premises in High Street, who in 1858 is noted as holding the lease of the plot they were later to fill from George Tate, a timber merchant and major landholder in the area after whom Tate's Avenue is named. Lowry himself was the first occupant of the newly built No. 9; No. 11 was first occupied by a Henrietta Walsh, No. 13 by James S. Sheerer, and No. 15 by an Andrew Munce, with all dwellings 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 noted as being in pasture, and sub-let it to a Nathaniel Greer, who by the end of the following year had built the present Nos. 24 and 26 Wellington Park. By that stage, a Mary Pollock and a Mary Anne Kearney had become the occupants of Nos. 13 and 15 respectively. In the early years the rate of turnover of tenants in all the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events in the years immediately following 1860 is confusing, with the valuations full of undated overlapping notes and the accompanying maps not fully annotated. It is clear, however, that Nos. 5 to 7 were the next to be built, again by John Lowry, with a Thomas Frazer responsible for the development of Nos. 17 to 21. The precise dating is uncertain, but an analysis of the handwriting styles of the various valuers — and their inadvertent use of subtly different ink colours — suggests that all may have been in place by 1869, though this is not certain, as the street directory of 1870 appears to list only six houses. All eleven properties are recorded in the directory of 1877, however, and the use of the name Wellington Park Terrace in a Belfast City Corporation minute of 1874 suggests that all were present at that point.

Some time after the building of Nos. 17 to 21, No. 15 was extended to join with No. 17, creating an unbroken terrace from No. 3 to No. 21. This work would logically have been carried out at or shortly after around 1869, when No. 17 itself was built, but the valuations make no mention of any extension prior to at least 1883, and a gap is shown in the terrace on Marcus Ward and Co.'s maps of Belfast for 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of these maps is questionable — they do not show Nos. 5 to 7 either — but it is unusual that the valuations record no alterations to the property. The detailing to the door screen appears to post-date 1880, though it could of course have been altered at a later stage.

It has been suggested that the terrace was built as the first part of what was intended to be a square. However, as the development history demonstrates, the terrace was built piecemeal by different individuals with no evidence of any grander unified scheme behind it. The large garden to the immediate south belonging to Eglantine Hill, which remained largely untouched until the later 1880s, would in any case have prohibited such a plan. The houses ultimately ended up sandwiched between two larger terraces as a consequence of the fact that when the grounds of Eglantine Hill were eventually sold off entirely, the developers found it more convenient to create a new broad thoroughfare to the south — the present Eglantine Avenue.