51 Sunnyside Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT7 3EX

51 Sunnyside Street, Belfast is a terraced two-storey house with attic dormer, built around 1870. Constructed in redbrick, it forms part of a terrace of six similar houses lining the north side of Sunnyside Street.

The house is L-shaped on plan, facing south. It has a pitched artificial slate roof with clay ridge tiles and a replacement brick chimney stack to the east with terracotta pots. A wall-head dormer is shared with the adjoining house (No.53), featuring timber bargeboard, redbrick walling, and a small square-headed window opening. Plastic guttering sits on a painted stone eaves course with a polychromatic brick frieze below.

The redbrick walling is laid in Flemish bond with a painted sandstone plinth course. Window openings are square-headed with painted masonry lintels and sills, fitted with replacement timber casement windows. The front elevation is two windows wide, with a decorative painted masonry doorcase positioned to the left, abutting that of the adjoining house. The doorcase comprises a square-headed door opening with a replacement timber panelled door and rectangular overlight, flanked by plain pilasters on plinth blocks. Oversized foliate console brackets (the western one shared with the adjoining house) support a shared lintel cornice and decorative segmental stone panel above. The door opens onto a cobblelock front path and garden enclosed by a replacement timber fence on a replacement brick wall.

The rear elevation features a shared two-storey return with painted cement rendered walling, replacement timber casement windows, and masonry sills. A small enclosed rear yard with a screen wall opens into the rear garden. The east and west side elevations are abutted by adjoining houses.

The house was built as part of a development by Thomas Fitzpatrick, a sculptor and building contractor who purchased the land for this purpose. Fitzpatrick, described as "a really remarkable working sculptor," was responsible for fine examples of stone carving on many Belfast buildings, including the Harbour Office and the Merchant Hotel. Having begun as a sculptor in partnership with his brother William in the 1850s, he became a general building contractor in the 1860s and remained active until the 1890s or later.

The area west of the Ormeau Road was largely open until the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Though partly divided into spacious plots for large mansions, it had been very sparsely built on. This terrace was one of the first developments along the newly laid out Sunnyside Street, and until the early twentieth century few houses had been built along the road. The area has since become intensively developed, and what was once an isolated row of dwellings has been absorbed by Belfast's continued expansion.

The terrace first appeared in valuation records as unfinished houses and yards in 1869. The buildings were completed and valued in 1870 at £15 each. According to surviving papers of the Fitzpatrick Brothers, the houses were sold in pairs: numbers 43 and 45 were sold to Thomas Neill, who occupied one and let the other; numbers 51 and 53 were sold to Samuel McCormick, who also occupied one while letting the other. The ownership of the middle pair is less certain; they appear to have passed through a number of landlords in quick succession but were both let out.

The occupants would appear to have been comfortable, employed as commercial travellers, clerks, and shopkeepers; they rarely had servants but were generally involved in supervisory and clerical rather than manual work.

In 1870 the occupier of number 51 was Joseph Boucher. The house was then sold to Samuel McCormick, who was occupying the neighbouring house in 1877. Subsequent occupiers were Abraham Morris, commercial traveller (1877), Allen Martin, traveller (1880), and S. Menary, insurance agent (1884). By the 1901 census the occupier was Samuel Clawson, a clerk, who lived with his wife and eight children aged between 12 years and one month. Clawson remained in the house in 1911 and by then had twelve children, the youngest six months old. The older children were working: four daughters as warehouse girls and a grocer's assistant, and a son as an apprentice plater. The family had a boarder, a vanman from County Cavan. Later tenants included Mrs McKenna (1914), Mary Jane Reville (1916), George Reville (1921–1922), Mrs Reville (1925), T. Braniff, carter (1937), James Braniff, civil service (1969), and Mrs Violet Murphy (1974), who was resident until 1976. The house continues in use as a domestic dwelling.

A further two terraced houses were added to the east of the row between 1905 and 1909, but these are not included in the current listing.

Despite extensive refurbishment with the loss of much original fabric, the house retains its overall composition and decorative detailing, making a marked contribution to the late nineteenth-century character of the street. However, it is not of sufficient interest to consider listing individually or as part of a group.