19 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

19 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 forms part of a sub-terrace of three mid-Victorian two-storey dwellings with dormered roofs, comprising numbers 17 to 21, which together make up the western end of a longer terrace of nine dwellings running from numbers 5 to 21. A further two houses, numbers 1 and 3, are part of the same terrace but are separated from the others by a laneway. Numbers 17 to 21 share a pedestrian access off the main Wellington Park Terrace road and look out onto individual gardens. The large, semi-communal green space at the front, uninterrupted by driveways or paths, gives the setting a unique character.

The front principal elevation is of fair-faced brick laid in Flemish bond, using a red brick with colour variations that give an attractive brindled appearance. The elevation is asymmetric, with the two first-floor windows out of alignment with the ground-floor entrance door and window. Door and window heads have flattened segmental brick-and-a-half arches, with squint headers forming an eyebrow course above. The door arch has a stucco keystone, and squint stretchers form the central part of the soffit of each arch. At first-floor cill level there is a stucco string course, beneath which runs a string course of headers alternating with squint headers. At eaves level, four courses of cream-coloured Flemish bond brick are carried on a corbel formed of a course of headers alternating with squint headers.

All three windows are two-over-two vertically divided sliding sashes in white-painted timber, with minimal exposure of the frames. The front door appears to be original and has four panels with bolection mouldings in dark blue-painted timber, with a rectangular fanlight above.

The roof has a large felted flat-roofed dormer of timber construction with picture-frame windows and rectangular glazing to the cheeks. It is similar to, but smaller than, the dormer to the adjoining number 17. The main roof slopes are covered in natural, presumably Welsh, slate. The chimneys are in facing brick similar to that of the front elevation, built in two stages with the top four courses forming a corbel. They have round clay pots, all but one of which appears to be original.

The rear elevation is finished in white-painted cement roughcast. There is a sliding sash window at first-floor level to the rear elevation. At roof level to the rear there is a small flat-roofed dormer, its front comprising a pair of side-hung casements. There is a two-storey back return, similar to that of number 21, with a low-pitch slated roof. At first-floor level the return has two original window openings facing into the small enclosed yard of number 21. The window openings appear to be original, though the frames have been replaced with top-hung plastic units. Generally, the back returns to numbers 19 and 21 appear to be as originally built. The rear yard is enclosed by a rendered wall with a security railing over the top.

The historical background to the terrace 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. Long, narrow strip farms stretched westwards from this road, 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 itself. 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, perpetuity 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, comprising small country villas surrounded by spacious gardens, many occupying the former farm strips between the Malone and new Lisburn Road. These included, travelling southwards, Fountainville Cottage (close to today's Fountainville Avenue), Elm Wood (roughly where the Queen's University 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), and 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 relatively grand terraced and semi-detached dwellings. The development of Wellington Park and Wellington Park Terrace was part of this expansion, which over the course of the next forty years or so led to the establishment of the suburbs of the University and Malone area as they appear today.

Research by Stephen Carleton has shown that numbers 1 and 3 of what was to become Wellington Park Terrace were built in 1854. They are recorded in the valuation of 1858 as occupied by a Frances Ogilby at number 1 and William Ferguson at number 3, both properties leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22. Annotations within the same valuation book show that numbers 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 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 number 9. Number 11 was first occupied by a Henrietta Walsh, number 13 by James S. Sheerer, and number 15 by an Andrew Munce, with all dwellings valued at £13. Number 15, then at the western end of the block, appears to have been originally 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 numbers 24 and 26 Wellington Park. By this stage a Mary Pollock and a Mary Anne Kearney had become the occupants of numbers 13 and 15 respectively. In the early years the rate of turnover of tenants in all of the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events in the years immediately following 1860 is complex, with valuations containing undated overlapping notes and accompanying maps not fully annotated. It is clear, however, that numbers 5 to 7 were the next to be built, again by John Lowry, with a Thomas Frazer responsible for the development of numbers 17 to 21. The dating is not certain, 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, 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 numbers 17 to 21, number 15 was extended to join with number 17, thus creating an unbroken terrace from number 3 to number 21. This work would be assumed to have been carried out in or shortly after around 1869, when number 17 itself was built. The valuations, however, make no mention of any extension prior to at least 1883, and a gap is shown in the terrace on Marcus Ward and Company's maps of Belfast of 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of these maps is questionable — they do not show numbers 5 to 7 either — but it is notable that the valuations do not record any alterations to the property. The detailing to the door screen appears to post-date 1880, though this could well have been changed at a later date.

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