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

21 McMaster Street is a two-storey, single-bay terraced parlour house built around 1896, located on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett district of East Belfast. It was developed by John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son, a practice active between the 1890s and 1910s who were also responsible for similar terraced streets in Belfast including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place.

The house forms part of a terrace of 37 parlour houses built in several phases between 1899 and 1908. McMaster Street is the only late Victorian terrace in Belfast to have survived in reasonably original condition, and the street was listed in 1987 and designated a conservation area in 1994. Number 21 has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street.

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 polychrome brick eaves course sitting on an ovolo-moulded corbel course. The walls are laid in English garden-wall bond — alternating courses of headers and stretchers in red brick — with three polychrome brick string courses, including a continuous brick-and-sill course at first-floor level, and decorative polychrome detailing above the first-floor windows. All polychrome brickwork is now painted except for that above the first-floor windows. Windows throughout are one-over-one timber sliding sashes, and the door is a replacement timber panelled door. Both windows and door are set within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and projecting masonry sills.

The principal, east-facing elevation has the entrance door to the right, comprising the replacement timber panelled door with a square-headed transom light, accessed by a rendered threshold. A window sits to the left of the entrance at ground level, and two windows at first-floor level are offset slightly to the left. The north gable abuts number 19 McMaster Street, and the south gable abuts number 23. Access to the house and yard was not provided during inspection, and the rear elevation is not visible from the entry. 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 to south between the back yards of Parker Street and McMaster Street.

The street setting is an important part of the house's character. McMaster Street is wide — formerly cobbled, now largely concrete with small cobbled areas remaining at each end. The house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs, original lamp posts and electric lighting that were formerly gas lights. Original tiled street signage survives at both the north and south ends of the street. The street narrows towards Major Street at the south.

The houses were built to a high specification for workers' housing of the period, with running water and flush toilets, and were designed in compliance with building controls that required a rear entrance, a back yard, and a toilet. Gas was piped in for lighting from the outset; electricity did not become commonplace until the 1930s. The houses are of the parlour type, and those towards the south end of the street — numbers 13 to 37, all two storeys — were valued at £8 in 1900. Number 21 contained three bedrooms, was fitted for gas, and had a weekly rent of five shillings, with an estimated construction cost of £76.

The first recorded tenant was James Thom, a boilermaker, who leased the house from developer John McMaster. The 1901 census records Thom living there with his wife and three young children. The next tenant, John Dunne, an engineer, lived in the house for 47 years. He was present at the 1911 census with his wife and five children, the oldest of whom, aged fourteen, was working as an apprentice hairdresser. In 1940 the family suffered a bereavement when the second oldest son, William John Dunne, a fitter, died aged 38 at the Royal Victoria Hospital.

Number 21 was unaffected by the Belfast Blitz. During April and May 1941, four air raids caused damage to over half of Belfast's housing stock. Although McMaster Street 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 had been vacated — probably as a result of fire damage — number 21 escaped unscathed, and the Dunne family remained in residence throughout the war. Subsequent tenants included J. Nicholl, a house repair painter, from 1951, followed by Ms Maudie Nicholl from 1979.

The house was built close to the Harland and Wolff shipyards, which were employing 9,000 men by 1900, and it represents an important connection with Belfast's industrial past. Ballymacarrett, which had been an area of fields, cottages and mansions around an industrial core in the mid-19th century, was gradually given over to rows of terraces housing workers from the shipyards, ropeworks, linen mills, engineering works and fertiliser businesses that drove Belfast's prosperity. The male inhabitants of McMaster Street were often employed in shipbuilding; female inhabitants frequently worked in the linen or rope industries. Families requiring more space lived at the north end of the street, where the houses have an additional attic storey. Redevelopment in the 1970s led to the demolition of many other terraces in the area, but McMaster Street survived, and two of its houses have since been restored by Hearth.