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

23 McMaster Street, Ballymacarrett, East Belfast

This is a two-storey, single-bay late Victorian terraced parlour house, built around 1896 by developer John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son. It sits on the west side of McMaster Street and forms part of a complete street of 37 terraced houses constructed in several phases between 1899 and 1908. McMaster Street is the only late Victorian terrace in Belfast to have survived in reasonable original condition, and the street was listed in 1987 and designated a conservation area in 1994 by the Department of the Environment. Number 23 has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street.

Architectural Description

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, with decorative detailing above the first-floor windows. All polychromatic brickwork is now painted, except for that above the first-floor windows. Windows and doors are boarded and are set within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and projecting masonry sills.

The principal (east) elevation has an entrance door at the right, comprising a replacement timber panelled door with a square-headed transom light, accessed by a tiled threshold. The entrance is flanked by a window to its left. At first-floor level there are two windows, offset slightly to the left. The north gable abuts No. 21 McMaster Street and the south gable abuts No. 25 McMaster Street. Access to the house and yard was not provided at the time of inspection, and the remainder of the rear elevation is not visible from the entry at the west.

Roof: natural slate. Walling: English garden-wall bonded red brick. Rainwater goods: ogee-profile cast iron.

Setting

The house sits at the centre of the west terrace — the two-storey block — and faces directly onto McMaster Street. The wide street was formerly cobbled and is 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 (formerly gas lights), and original tiled street signage at the north and south ends. 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–south between the back yards of Parker Street and McMaster Street. The street narrows towards Major Street to the south.

Historical Background

McMaster Street was built close to the Harland and Wolff shipyards, and the terrace provides a direct link with Belfast's industrial past. In the closing decades of the 19th century, Harland and Wolff developed a shipyard on Queen's Island that was employing 9,000 men by 1900. The surrounding district of Ballymacarrett was also a centre for ropeworks, linen manufacture, engineering, and fertiliser production — businesses that traded around the world. What 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 the workers who were, to a large degree, the generators of Belfast's newfound prosperity.

Construction of McMaster Street began with a row of two-and-a-half-storey houses at numbers 2 to 14, which were in place by 1899. The second phase added numbers 1 to 11, also two-and-a-half storeys, noted in the 1900 street directory alongside "houses in course of erection." By the time of the March 1901 census, numbers 1 to 35 were complete (number 37 does not appear in the census but is listed in the 1901 street directory), and the remaining houses, numbers 16 to 52, were added by 1908. The designers, John Fraser and Son, were active between the 1890s and 1910s and were architects of a number of terraced streets in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place, which are similar in character to McMaster Street.

The houses on the western side of McMaster Street first appear in valuation records in 1900. They are of the parlour type and were built to a high specification, with running water and flush toilets — emerging technologies for workers' housing at the time. They were constructed to building controls that required a rear entrance and a back yard with a toilet. Gas was piped in for lighting, though electricity did not become commonplace until the 1930s, and lamp-lighters and window-tappers were daily visitors to the street. Male inhabitants were often employed in shipbuilding; female inhabitants commonly worked in the linen or rope industry. Larger families lived at the north end of the street in houses with an attic storey. Numbers 13 to 37 — all two-storey houses and yards — were valued at £8, slightly lower than numbers 1 to 11 at the north end.

Number 23 specifically was first leased by Thomas Ervine from the developer John McMaster. The 1900 valuation records described it as four years old, though this appears to be an overestimate, as the house was likely no more than a year old at that time. It contained three bedrooms, was fitted with gas, had a weekly rent of 5 shillings, and was estimated to have cost £76 to build.

At the time of the 1901 census, the tenant was Mary Walker, a 35-year-old widow from Armagh, who lived in the house with her mother and two younger brothers — a warehouse porter and a labourer in an iron works. Mary Walker was still present at the 1911 census, though her mother had died by then, and one of her brothers had become a packer in a tobacco works. Subsequent tenants included Hamilton Coates, joiner (1915), and S. Adair, French polisher (1938), who moved into the house following the death of the previous tenant at Purdysburn.

The Adair family was forced to leave during the Belfast Blitz. There were four air raids on Belfast during April and May 1941, during which over half the city's housing stock was damaged. Although McMaster Street was not destroyed, the area was targeted in raids on 7/8 April and 4/5 May 1941. The 1942 street directory records that most houses in the street had been vacated, including number 13, probably as a result of fire damage. By 1943 most residents had returned, but the Adair family did not, and the house was taken over by Robert Mackrel, welder, in 1943. Miss Elizabeth Gordon was the occupier from 1970 until at least 1980.

In recent years East Belfast has experienced 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 of the houses in McMaster Street have since been restored by Hearth.