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

24 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, and located on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast. It forms part of a complete surviving street of late Victorian terraced housing and has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street.

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles and a red brick chimney stack at the south side. Painted ogee-profile cast-iron rainwater goods are supported on a projecting polychromatic brick eaves course set over an ovolo-moulded corbel course. The walls are constructed in English garden-wall bond — alternating courses of headers and stretchers — in red brick, with two polychromatic brick string courses, one of which forms a continuous brick-and-sill course at first floor level. Windows and doors sit within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and projecting masonry sills.

The principal (west) elevation has an entrance door at the left, accessed via a concrete threshold and flanked by a window to the right, with two windows at first floor level offset slightly to the right. The north gable abuts No. 22 McMaster Street, and the south gable abuts No. 26. The rear elevation was not accessible at the time of the original survey. At the rear there is an enclosed yard accessed from the entry via a timber-sheeted door to the east, contained within high-level brick walling on all sides.

By the time of a re-survey in February 2013, all windows on the front elevation had been replaced, including a new timber panelled door with a camber-headed transom light. Paint had been removed from all brickwork, including the plinth, the brick chamfered reveals, and the camber-headed window reveals. At the time of the earlier 2011 survey, all polychromatic brickwork below first-floor window level had been painted over.

The street setting contributes significantly to the character of the building. McMaster Street is wide — formerly cobbled but now largely concrete with small cobbled sections at each end — and the house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs, original lamp posts, and electric lighting converted from former gas fittings. Original tiled street signage survives at both the north and south ends of the street. At the rear, a narrow north–south entry runs between the back yards of McMaster Street and Lendrick Street, with the rear boundary formed by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling and a painted, vertically-sheeted timber entrance door. The street narrows towards Major Street to the south, a consequence of the wedge-shaped plot of land originally owned by John McMaster, meaning the terraces and their gardens became progressively narrower towards the southern end as construction proceeded.

The eastern terrace of McMaster Street, of which No. 24 is part (nos. 16–52), was constructed in 1908, a decade after the western terrace and the lower portion of the eastern terrace (nos. 1–37 and nos. 6–14), which were built in 1898 and 1899. The first occupant recorded in the Annual Revisions was a Mr. Robert Wallace, a shipyard driller, who took possession in 1908 when the terrace was completed. At that time the house was valued at £8 and was let by John McMaster himself. By 1910, a Mr. Charles Buckle had come into possession; the 1911 Census records him as a boilermaker in the shipyards, and the Census Building Return of that year described No. 24 as a second-class dwelling consisting of seven rooms. Buckle vacated the house between 1911 and 1918, when a Mr. H. Powell, an electrician, is recorded at the address in the Belfast Street Directories. By the end of the Annual Revisions in 1930, the valuation remained at £8, but by the First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland in 1935 it had risen to £11. By the outbreak of the Second World War, a Mr. Robert Thompson had come into possession. McMaster Street escaped damage during the Luftwaffe raids of 1941, which caused widespread destruction to buildings and residential terraces along the Newtownards Road. The Second General Revaluation, carried out after the war, recorded that ownership of the street had passed from John McMaster to an L. McMaster (relationship unknown), and the value of No. 24 rose to £12, remaining at that level through to the end of the revaluation period in 1972. Robert Thompson continued to occupy the house until his death in the 1950s, after which his widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Thompson, lived there until the 1980s.

The architect J. Frazer (of J. Frazer and Son, also referenced as John Frazer and Sons) was active from the 1890s into the second decade of the twentieth century and also designed other terraced streets in Belfast including Chadwick Street (built 1899) and Meadowbank Place, both similar in design to McMaster Street. The parlour houses on McMaster Street were built to new housing and planning regulations intended to improve living standards for working-class people in Belfast. They were among the first late Victorian industrial terraces in Belfast to be supplied with running water and flushable toilets, made possible by a new city drainage system, and gas piping for lighting was also provided from the outset — both features that distinguished the street from the more squalid early Victorian housing typical of the city at that time. Electricity was not introduced to the street until the 1930s.

During the 1970s, the Ballymacarrett area was extensively redeveloped with the demolition of many similar red brick terraces. McMaster Street survived as an intact remnant of late Victorian working-class housing, and in 1987 No. 24 was listed along with the rest of the terrace. In 1994, the neighbourhood was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment, with criteria established to ensure that any additions or alterations remained in keeping with the original design and fabric of the street.