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

22 McMaster Street is a two-storey, single-bay late Victorian terraced house built around 1896–1898 by landowner John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son. It stands on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast, close to the former Harland and Wolff shipyards. The house forms part of a complete, intact street of late Victorian terraced housing and carries group value with the other listed buildings on McMaster Street. It sits within a conservation area designated by the Department of the Environment in 1994.

ARCHITECTURE

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles and a red brick chimney stack at the south side. Rainwater goods are painted ogee-profile cast iron supported on projecting polychromatic brick eaves course over an ovolo moulded corbel course. The walls are English garden-wall bonded red brick, laid with alternating courses of headers and stretchers, with two polychromatic brick string courses including a continuous brick and sill course at first-floor level. Windows are replacement 1/1 camber-headed horizontally divided timber sliding sashes. The door is a replacement timber panelled door with a camber-headed transom light. All windows and the door are set within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and have projecting masonry sills. Paint has been removed from all brickwork including the plinth, the brick chamfered reveals and the camber-headed window reveals.

The principal (west) elevation has the entrance door at the left, accessed via a concrete threshold, flanked by a window to the right. Two windows at first-floor level are offset slightly to the right. The north gable abuts No. 20 McMaster Street and the south gable abuts No. 24 McMaster Street. The rear (east) elevation was not accessible at the time of survey. Access to the enclosed rear yard is from the entry via a timber sheeted entrance door at the east, contained within high-level brick walling on all sides. The rear elevation 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 to south between the back yards of Lendrick Street and McMaster Street.

SETTING

The house sits at the north end of the east terrace two-storey block, facing onto McMaster Street. The wide street, formerly cobbled, is now largely concrete with small cobbled areas at each end. The house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs and original lamp posts and electric lighting (formerly gas lights). Original tiled street signage survives at the north and south ends of the street. The street narrows towards Major Street at the south.

HISTORY

The eastern terrace of McMaster Street (nos. 16–52) was not completed until 1908, a decade after construction of the street began. The western terrace (nos. 1–37) and nos. 6–14 on the eastern side were constructed in 1898 and 1899. No. 22 first appears on the fourth edition of the Ordnance Survey map for Belfast dated 1920–21. Annual Revision records indicate that the first occupant was a Mr James White, who came into possession in the year the terrace was completed. In 1908 the house was valued at £8 and let by John McMaster, who owned the wedge-shaped parcel of land on the south side of the Newtownards Road on which he constructed the street. Because the land was wedge shaped, the terraces became progressively narrower and the gardens smaller as they extended towards the far end of the street.

By the 1901 Census White had vacated the house; by 1911 a Mr Robert Maguire, employed as a driller at the shipyards, was in possession. The Census Building Return described the house as a second-class dwelling consisting of seven rooms. Maguire left before 1918, when William Hopkins, a brass finisher at the shipyards, occupied the house and remained there until the 1940s. The value of the house remained at £8 by the end of the Annual Revisions in 1930, rising to £11 by the First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland in 1935.

In the 1940s occupation passed to James Harvey, employed as a bank manager. During the Second World War, McMaster Street escaped damage in the 1941 Belfast Blitz, when the Luftwaffe targeted the nearby shipyards causing widespread destruction to buildings and residential terraces along the Newtownards Road. The Second General Revaluation of Northern Ireland, carried out after the war, recorded that ownership of the street had passed from John McMaster to an L. McMaster (unknown relative), and the value of No. 22 increased to £12, where it remained until the end of that revaluation in 1972. Harvey remained at No. 22 until the 1970s, when a Mr J. Leckey came into possession.

J. Frazer and Son, the architects, were active between the 1890s and the second decade of the 20th century and also designed other terraced streets in Belfast including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place, which are similar in design to McMaster Street. Chadwick Street was built in 1899, when the first phase of McMaster Street had been completed.

The parlour houses on McMaster Street were constructed to new housing and planning regulations designed to improve living standards in Belfast. They were among the first late Victorian industrial houses in Belfast to be supplied with running water and flushable toilets, made possible by the construction of a new city drainage system. Gas was piped into each house to provide lighting, setting McMaster Street apart from the more squalid housing common in Belfast during the early Victorian period. Electricity was not introduced to the street until the 1930s.

During the 1970s the Ballymacarrett area was extensively redeveloped, with the demolition of many red brick terraces similar to McMaster Street. The preservation of McMaster Street as an intact remnant of late Victorian working-class housing was consequently sought, and in 1987 No. 22 was listed along with the rest of the terrace. No. 22 is one of two houses on the eastern terrace — the other being No. 42 — that was acquired by Hearth Housing Association for restoration after lying vacant and in a state of disrepair. The restoration project took place in 2000–01 and was undertaken by McNally Contractors Ltd. of Randalstown, who gutted the interior, restored the original floor plan, and repointed the brickwork.