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

29 McMaster Street is a two-storey, single-bay terraced parlour house built around 1896 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 and responsible for several 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. Located close to the Harland and Wolff shipyards, it represents an important link with Belfast's industrial past and with the city's role as a world centre of shipbuilding. The houses were built to new housing and planning regulations intended to raise living standards for working-class people, and were constructed to a notably high specification for workers' housing of the period, including running water, flush toilets with rear yard access, and piped gas for lighting.

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 to 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 — alternating courses of headers and stretchers in red brick — with three polychromatic brick string courses, including a continuous brick-and-sill course at first-floor level, and decorative detailing above the first-floor windows. All polychromatic brickwork is now painted except for that above the first-floor windows. Window openings and the door are set within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, with projecting masonry sills. The windows are replacement 1-over-1 uPVC sashes and the doors are replacement timber panelled with glazing.

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. A window sits to the left of the door at ground floor, with a single window to the left at first floor. To the north, the gable is abutted by a single-storey extension with a pitched roof covered in replacement tiles; the north gable of this extension abuts number 27 McMaster Street. The south gable is abutted by number 31 McMaster Street. The rear elevation was not accessible at the time of inspection and is enclosed by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling, with a painted vertically-sheeted timber entrance door at the centre, reached via a narrow entry running north to south between the back yards of Parker Street and McMaster Street.

The house sits at the south end of the west terrace. It opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs. The street, formerly cobbled, is now largely concrete with small areas of original cobbling remaining at each end. Original lamp posts with electric lighting — formerly gas — remain in place, and original tiled street signage survives at the north and south ends. The street narrows towards Major Street to the south.

The area of Ballymacarrett, which in the mid-19th century had been a mixture of fields, cottages, mansions and an industrial core, was progressively developed into rows of terraced housing to accommodate workers drawn to the expanding industries of East Belfast. By 1900 Harland and Wolff's shipyard on Queen's Island was employing around 9,000 men, and Ballymacarrett was also home to ropeworks, linen manufacture, engineering and fertiliser industries. The houses on the west side of McMaster Street first appear in valuation records in 1900. Numbers 13 to 37 — all two-storey houses with yards — were each valued at £8. The present house originally contained three bedrooms, was fitted with gas, and carried a weekly rent of five shillings, with construction costs estimated at £76. Gas was the standard means of lighting until electricity became more common from the 1930s onwards; lamp-lighters and window-tappers were daily presences in the street. Male residents were commonly employed in shipbuilding, and female residents frequently in the linen or rope industries.

The first recorded occupant of number 29 was Stuart Barr, who leased the house from the developer John McMaster. The 1901 census records the occupier as Stewart Blair, a widowed carter living with five children aged between 6 and 18, the two eldest working as a tobacco roller and a rivet boy at the shipyard on Queen's Island. By the 1911 census the house was occupied by Samuel Gray, a stone mason, his wife, and three children; his oldest son worked as a general clerk in a merchant's office and his daughter as a machine smoother in a linen factory. Elizabeth Sullivan took over the house in 1918, but the Sullivan family was displaced during the Belfast Blitz. Belfast suffered four air raids during April and May 1941, during which over half the city's housing stock was damaged. McMaster Street itself was targeted in raids on the nights of 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. The majority of residents had returned by 1943, but the Sullivans did not, and by that year the house had been taken over by Mrs Greenaway. James Greenaway, a bricklayer, is recorded as householder in 1953. Subsequent tenants included Vernon Braithwaite, clerk (1964), William Kitchen, confectioner (1968), and D. Watton (1979).

In the 1970s, redevelopment led to the demolition of many of the other terraces in the surrounding area. McMaster Street was listed in 1987 and the area was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment in 1994. Two houses in the street have since been restored by Hearth. Number 29 has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street.