288 Tennent Street, Belfast, Co Antrim, BT13 3GG

288 Tennent Street is a terraced house in the Shankill area of Belfast, built between 1907 and 1909 to designs by the Belfast architectural partnership of Robert Hill and Edwin Kennedy. It forms part of a group of similar houses known as Edenderry Terrace (the wider group referenced as HB26/36/001A–J), constructed by the Edenderry Spinning Company, whose mill formerly stood immediately to the west of the site. The building was delisted in August 2015 on the grounds that, while it and the terrace as a whole demonstrate key elements of the Arts and Crafts movement — including dormers, bay windows, roughcast render and varied rooflines — the group has suffered from inappropriate incremental changes that have seriously compromised its historic fabric and detailing, meaning it is no longer considered of special architectural or historic interest.

The house is an asymmetrical, two-bay, two-storey-with-attic terraced brick building facing east onto the western side of Tennent Street. It is rectilinear on plan with a two-storey gabled return and a single-storey lean-to structure to the rear, along with an internal yard and a single-storey conservatory with deck to the rear (noted as of no interest).

The roof is pitched and clad in red clay tiles with roll-moulded red clay ridge tiles. There is a single brick chimney with moulded detail on the principal face, topped by tall clay pots with a rosette motif. A timber-framed dormer window to the attic has clay tile cheeks but a replacement window; a modern skylight has been inserted in the rear roof slope. Rainwater goods are half-round uPVC to the brick eaves course, with cast-iron downpipes to the first floor including a hopper dated 1907.

The walling is in Flemish-bonded brick on the principal elevation, with decorative clay vents to the main façade, and English Garden Wall bond to the rear. All windows on the main façade have been replaced with uPVC units; the rear has replacement timber casements with flat arch heads. Sills to the principal elevation are offset and painted brick; those to the rear ground floor are concrete.

The principal (east) elevation is two openings wide at ground floor. The front door is white uPVC set within a moulded brick camber-arch surround, surmounted by a deeply projecting mono-pitched timber canopy supported by the projecting first floor of the adjoining property to the south (HB26/36/001F). The canopy features exposed timber eaves, a red-tile roof and applied half-timbering detail. To the right of the entrance is a fully glazed canted bay window. At first-floor level there is a central wide segmental-arched surround casement window with offset painted brick sills, a label moulding, and replacement timber-sheeted decorative shutters. The south elevation is abutted by the adjoining terrace (HB26/36/001F); the north elevation is abutted by the adjoining terrace (HB26/36/001H).

The rear (west) elevation incorporates the two-storey pitched-roof return. The south cheek of this return is blank. The west gable has a central window above a replacement single-storey lean-to structure in brick with a slate roof, which formerly served as the coal shed and has now been incorporated into the kitchen. A single-storey conservatory abuts the gable end of the former coal shed. The north cheek is abutted by the original single-storey yard wall; at this level there is an enlarged window and door at ground floor and a small window on the first floor. The principal rear elevation has a central window on both ground and first floors, with roughcast render to the first floor and an attic window to the left above the return. A timber-sheeted and braced door through the boundary wall leads to the internal yard.

The house first appears on the fourth edition Ordnance Survey map of 1920–31, on a site that had previously formed part of the Edenderry flax spinning mill complex. The area had developed rapidly during the mid-19th century as a consequence of the thriving linen industry and an expanding industrial workforce. The Annual Revisions of 1906–15 record the house and yard as being added in 1909 at a rateable value of £14. The first recorded occupant was William Fleet, identified in the 1911 Census as an Engineering Pattern Maker from England, who shared the house with five family members and a boarder. The property was first listed in the 1910 Street Directory as No. 4 Edenderry Gardens before being renumbered as part of Tennent Street in subsequent decades. By the time of the first and second General Revaluations (1935 and 1956–72), the value of the house and garden had risen to £20, with a Sarah Fleet recorded as occupier in 1956.

The house was designed and built at a time when improving housing conditions meant that working-class terraced houses were being constructed with provision for a single family, a rear yard accessible by a passage from the front, a number of sizable windows to the main elevation, and the modern amenities of the period — a marked contrast to the overcrowded, unserviced housing common before late-19th-century building and sanitation regulations. Constructed toward the end of Belfast's second great building phase, the house reflects the Arts and Crafts detailing characteristic of its architects Hill and Kennedy. The Edenderry Spinning Company retained ownership of the property until at least 1972. The spinning mill continued to operate on the adjacent site until 1988; the area to the rear has since become a mixed-use business park and apartment complex. Some late-20th-century repairs and alterations are noted on the heritage building file.

The setting is urban, on the western side of Tennent Street between the Crumlin and Shankill Roads. To the front there is a small, newly paved garden with a rebuilt half-height brick wall and a cast-iron gate facing east onto Tennent Street. To the rear is a long, narrow garden plot running west to the boundary wall. A paved walkway runs along the rear of all the properties in the terrace between the garden plots and the backs of the buildings, though this has been sealed with locked gates to the south. Crumlin Road Presbyterian Church is located to the north-east on the corner of Crumlin Road and Tennent Street.