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

46 McMaster Street is a two-storey, single-bay late Victorian terraced house, one of a complete street of similar properties built around 1896–1908 by the landowner John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son. It sits on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast, close to the former Harland and Wolff shipyards.

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles and a 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 English garden-wall bonded red brick laid in alternating courses of headers and stretchers, with two polychromatic brick string courses, one of which forms a continuous brick and sill course at first floor level. Window and door openings have camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and projecting masonry sills. At ground floor, the windows were replaced with horizontally divided uPVC casements at the time of the original listing description but had been replaced again by 2013 with appropriate 1/1 timber sliding sash windows. The first floor retains replacement square-headed 1/1 timber sliding sash windows. The entrance door is a replacement uPVC door with a uPVC-sheeted transom light above.

The principal elevation, which faces west onto McMaster Street, has the entrance door to the left, flanked by a window to the right, with two windows at first floor level offset slightly to the right. The north gable abuts No. 44 McMaster Street, and the south gable abuts No. 48. The rear elevation was only partially visible at the time of survey; at ground floor level it is abutted on the right by a two-storey flat-roof extension, which was granted planning permission by Belfast Town Planning Committee in 2000 as a sympathetic addition. The rear yard is enclosed and accessed from a narrow north–south entry running between the back yards of McMaster Street and Lendrick Street, through a timber-sheeted entrance door set within high-level brick walling on all sides.

The house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs. The street itself, formerly cobbled, is now largely concrete with small cobbled areas at each end. Original lamp posts and electric lighting (converted from former gas lights) remain in place, as does original tiled street signage at both the north and south ends of the street. The street narrows towards Major Street at its southern end.

The house forms part of a complete, intact terrace of late Victorian working class housing, giving it strong group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street. The terrace is historically significant for several reasons. It was built close to the Harland and Wolff shipyards and the ropework factories that were the principal local employers, and many of its occupants worked in those industries. The 1911 Census, for example, records a David Patterson living at No. 46 as an engine fitter employed at the shipyards; his house was recorded in the Census Building Return as a second-class dwelling consisting of seven rooms.

The houses on McMaster Street were also among the first late Victorian industrial terraces in Belfast to be built to new housing and planning regulations specifically intended to improve living standards for working class people. They were among the first such terraces supplied with running water and flushable toilets, made possible by a new city drainage system, and gas was piped into each house for lighting — a significant improvement over the more squalid early Victorian housing typical of the period. Electricity was not introduced to the street until the 1930s.

No. 46 first appears on the fourth edition Ordnance Survey map for Belfast, surveyed in 1920–21, which shows both terraces of McMaster Street as complete. The Belfast Street Directories indicate that the western terrace (Nos. 1–37) and Nos. 6–14 on the eastern terrace were constructed in 1898 and 1899, while the remainder of the eastern terrace, including Nos. 16–52, was not completed until 1908. No. 46 therefore falls within that later phase. The land on which the street was built was wedge-shaped, meaning that the terraced plots progressively narrowed towards the southern end of the street; as one of the southernmost houses, No. 46 consequently has a considerably smaller rear yard than properties further north.

The architect J. Frazer and Son (also referred to as John Frazer and Sons) was active from the 1890s into the early twentieth century and also designed similar terraced streets in Belfast including Chadwick Street, built in 1899, and Meadowbank Place.

The first recorded occupant of No. 46 was Andrew Haire, a plumber, who took possession in 1908 when the eastern terrace was completed. In 1908 the house was valued at £8 and was let by John McMaster, who owned the land on the south side of the Newtownards Road. By the end of the Annual Revisions in 1930 the value remained at £8, rising to £11 at the First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland in 1935. By the Second General Revaluation, which ran from 1956 to 1972, the value had increased to £12, at which level it remained until the close of the revaluation period. Ownership of the street had by that point passed from John McMaster to an L. McMaster, whose precise relationship to the original owner is unknown.

A Mr James Lecky, a joiner, was recorded as occupant in the 1918 Belfast Street Directory and continued to reside there until his death sometime in the 1930s, after which his widow, Mrs Elizabeth F. Lecky, took possession and remained until her own death in 1970 at the age of 82. The house subsequently passed to a Ms Violet Surgenor, who resided there during the 1980s and 1990s.

During the Second World War, McMaster Street survived the 1941 Belfast Blitz, in which Luftwaffe raids on the nearby shipyards caused significant destruction to buildings and residential terraces along the Newtownards Road. In the 1970s the wider Ballymacarrett area underwent extensive redevelopment during which many comparable red brick terraces were demolished. McMaster Street survived intact and was listed in 1987. In 1994 the neighbourhood was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment, with criteria established to ensure that any additions to the terrace remain in keeping with the original design and fabric of the Victorian street.