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

17 McMaster Street is a two-storey, single-bay late Victorian terraced house, built around 1896 on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett district of East Belfast. It was developed by John McMaster and designed by J. Frazer and Son, a practice active between the 1890s and 1910s and responsible for several similar terraced streets in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place. Number 17 forms part of a terrace of 37 parlour houses constructed in several phases between 1899 and 1908, and McMaster Street is the only late Victorian terrace in Belfast to have survived in reasonably original condition.

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 over an ovolo-moulded corbel course. The walls are English garden-wall bonded red brick, laid with alternating courses of headers and stretchers, with three polychrome brick string courses — including a continuous brick-and-sill course at first floor level — and decorative detailing above the first floor windows. All polychrome brickwork is now painted except for that above the first floor windows.

Windows 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 a replacement timber panelled door with a square-headed transom light, accessed by a rendered threshold. The entrance is flanked by a window to the left. At first floor, two windows are offset slightly to the left. The north gable abuts number 15 McMaster Street, and the south gable abuts the two-storey number 19 McMaster Street. Access to the house and yard was not provided during assessment, and the remainder of the rear elevation is not visible from the entry to the west.

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. This is accessed via a narrow entry running north to south between the back yards of Parker Street and McMaster Street.

The house sits at the centre of the two-storey block on the west terrace, facing directly onto McMaster Street. The wide street, formerly cobbled, 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. Original tiled street signage is present at the north and south ends of the street. The street narrows towards Major Street to the south.

The houses were built to a high specification, incorporating running water and flush toilets — emerging technologies for workers' housing at the time — and were designed in accordance with building controls that required a rear entrance, a back yard, and a toilet. Gas was piped in for lighting; electricity did not become commonplace until the 1930s, when lamp-lighters and window-tappers had been regular daily visitors. The houses are of the parlour type. Numbers 13 to 37, all two-storey houses with yards, were valued at £8 each; these houses towards the south end of the street are slightly smaller than numbers 1 to 11, which received a higher valuation.

Number 17 first entered valuation records in 1900. At that time, the house was leased by Ann Barkley from the developer John McMaster, and was said to be four years old, though it was likely no more than a year old at that point. It contained three bedrooms, was fitted with gas, and was let at a rent of five shillings per week; the cost of construction was estimated at £76. The 1901 census records the occupier as Anna Barnes, a widow, who lived there with her daughter and two sons — a stitcher, a joiner, and an apprentice fitter respectively. A succession of tenants followed: David Beggs, plasterer (1904); Hugh Hodge, stonecutter (1907); and by the 1911 census, William Mahood, a railway guard, who lived there with his wife and four young children aged between one and six. Subsequent tenants included E. McKernan, caulker (1914); William Lucas, labourer (1915); Samuel Gillespie, caulker (1916); Samuel Grey, foreman (1918); and John Gray, joiner (1937).

Unlike most other houses in the street, number 17 escaped damage during the Belfast Blitz. Four air raids struck Belfast during April and May 1941, during which over half the city's housing stock was damaged. McMaster Street was targeted during raids on 7–8 April and 4–5 May 1941, and the 1942 street directory records that most houses in the street had been vacated, probably as a result of fire damage. Number 17 was unaffected, and by 1942 was newly occupied by Miss E. Sullivan, whose family remained in residence until 1960, when the house was taken over by Mrs E. Rogers. James Brown, a lorry driver, was the occupant from 1972 until at least 1980.

The broader context of the street is closely tied to Belfast's industrial history. In the closing decades of the 19th century, Harland and Wolff developed a shipyard on Queen's Island that employed 9,000 men by 1900. Ballymacarrett was also a centre for ropeworks, linen manufacture, engineering, and fertiliser production — industries that traded around the world. What had been, in the mid-19th century, an area of fields, cottages, and mansions around an industrial core was gradually given over to rows of terraces housing the workers who were, to a large degree, the generators of Belfast's new prosperity. Male inhabitants were often employed in shipbuilding; female inhabitants frequently worked in the linen or rope industries. Larger families tended to occupy the houses at the north end of the street, which had an additional attic storey.

McMaster Street was built in several phases. A row of two-and-a-half-storey houses, numbers 2 to 14, was in place by 1899. The second phase produced numbers 1 to 11, also two-and-a-half storeys, noted in the 1900 street directory alongside references to houses then under construction. By the time of the March 1901 census, numbers 1 to 35 were complete (number 37, though absent from the census, appears in the 1901 street directory), and the remaining houses, numbers 16 to 52, were added by 1908.

Redevelopment during the 1970s led to the demolition of many of the other terraces in the area. McMaster Street was listed in 1987 and in 1994 was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment. Two houses in the street have been restored by Hearth. Number 17 has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street and is of local interest.