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

Number 5 McMaster Street is a two-storey-with-attic, single-bay late Victorian terraced parlour house, built around 1896 by developer 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 on Queen's Island.

The house is one of a terrace of 37 parlour houses built in several phases between 1899 and 1908, all to designs by John Fraser and Son, a practice active between the 1890s and 1910s and responsible for a number of similar terraced streets in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place. McMaster Street is the only late Victorian terrace in Belfast to have survived in reasonable original condition and represents an important connection with the city's history as a major world centre of shipbuilding. The street was listed in 1987 and designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment in 1994.

EXTERIOR

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 laid in English garden-wall bond — red brick with alternating courses of headers and stretchers — and feature three polychromatic brick string courses, including a continuous brick-and-sill course at first-floor level, along with decorative polychromatic brick detailing above the first-floor windows. All polychromatic brickwork is now painted except for the detailing above the first-floor windows. The windows and entrance door are replacements in uPVC — casement windows and a panelled door with glazing — all set within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and projecting masonry sills.

The principal (east) elevation has the entrance door to the right: a replacement uPVC door with a square-headed transom light, accessed by a rendered threshold. To the left of the door is a window at ground-floor level, with two windows at first-floor level offset slightly to the left. The north gable abuts Number 3 McMaster Street and the south gable abuts Number 7.

The rear elevation is abutted on the left by a single-storey lean-to extension running from the north boundary wall. The remainder of the rear elevation was not accessible at the time of survey. The rear of the property 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

Number 5 sits at the north end of the west terrace — the two-storey-with-attic block — and faces directly onto McMaster Street. The street was formerly cobbled and is now largely concrete, with small areas of original cobbling remaining at each end. The house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs and original lamp posts and electric lighting (formerly gas). Original tiled street signage survives at both the north and south ends of the street. The street narrows towards Major Street at the south.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The houses on the western side of McMaster Street first appear in valuation records in 1900. They were built to a high specification for workers' housing of the period, with running water and flush toilets — then emerging technologies for this class of housing. Building controls of the time required each house to have a rear entrance, a back yard, and a toilet. Gas was piped in for lighting; electricity did not become commonplace until the 1930s, and lamp-lighters and window-tappers were daily visitors to the street.

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, appear in the street directory for 1900, alongside notes of houses still under construction. By the census of March 1901, numbers 1 to 35 were complete (number 37 does not appear in the census but is listed in the 1901 street directory), and numbers 16 to 52 were added by 1908. Numbers 1 to 11 — all houses with two storeys plus an attic and a single-storey return — were valued at £10 10s, later reduced, possibly on appeal, to £9 10s. These houses at the north end are slightly larger than numbers 13 to 37, which received a lower valuation. The houses were occupied predominantly by workers in the shipbuilding, linen, and rope industries; larger families tended to live in the attic-storey houses at the north end of the street.

The construction of McMaster Street reflects the broader transformation of Ballymacarrett, which in the mid-19th century had been an area of fields, cottages, and mansions around an industrial core. As Harland and Wolff expanded — employing 9,000 men by 1900 — and as businesses in ropeworks, linen manufacture, engineering, and fertiliser grew, the area was gradually given over to rows of terraces housing the workers who were central to Belfast's prosperity.

Number 5 itself was the residence of Hugh Bowden, joiner, who leased it from developer John McMaster. In 1900 the house was described as four years old, though it is unlikely to have been more than two years old at that time. It contained four bedrooms and a sitting room, was fitted with gas, and let for £1 8s 4d per month (£17 per year minus taxes). The cost of construction was estimated at £105. The 1901 census records Hugh Bowden as a carpenter living with his wife, eight children (ranging in age from five months to fourteen years, the eldest working as a confectioner), and a 23-year-old boarder, William McCreevy, an iron turner. The family had left by 1902.

Subsequent occupants included J. Wallace, smith (from 1902); Marcus Sullivan, joiner (from 1907); Sullivan's widow (from around 1909, remaining through the 1911 census, when her daughters worked in the linen factory as hemstitchers and a seamstress, and her sons as an engine fitter and an apprentice joiner); and Samuel Gillespie, caulker (from 1918), whose wife continued to live in the house after his death. It is possible that Gillespie was killed during the Belfast Blitz of 1941. Belfast suffered four air raids during April and May 1941, damaging over half the city's housing stock. Although McMaster Street was not destroyed, the area was targeted in raids on the nights of 7–8 April and 4–5 May, and the 1942 street directory records that most houses in the street — including number 5 — had been vacated, probably as a result of fire damage. By 1943 most residents had returned, but Gillespie was not among them; from that point the householder is recorded as his wife, Mrs B. Gillespie. By 1962 the occupier was G. K. Kenny, fitter, who was resident until at least 1980.

In recent decades East Belfast has undergone substantial change, and many of the industries that drove its initial growth have contracted or disappeared. Redevelopment in the 1970s led to the demolition of many other terraces in the area. Two houses in McMaster Street have since been restored by Hearth. Number 5 has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street and is of local historical interest. The house is currently vacant.