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

47 Sunnyside Street is a terraced two-storey redbrick house with attic dormer, built around 1870. It forms part of a terrace of six similar houses lining the north side of Sunnyside Street in Belfast. The house has been extensively refurbished with considerable loss of original fabric, but retains its overall composition and decorative detailing. It makes a marked contribution to the late nineteenth-century character of the street, though it is not considered of sufficient individual or group interest for listing.

The building is L-shaped on plan, facing south. The pitched roof is covered in artificial slate with black clay ridge tiles and replacement brick chimneystack to the east with terracotta pots. The wall-head dormer is shared with the adjoining house No.49, featuring timber bargeboard, redbrick walling and a diminutive square-headed window opening. Plastic guttering sits on a painted stone eaves course, with a polychromatic brick frieze below and plastic downpipe.

The redbrick walling is laid in Flemish bond with a painted sandstone plinth course. Square-headed window openings have painted masonry lintels, painted masonry sills and uPVC windows. The front elevation is two windows wide, with a decorative painted masonry doorcase to the left, abutting that of the adjoining house. The doorcase comprises a square-headed door opening with replacement timber panelled door and rectangular overlight, flanked by plain pilasters on plinth blocks and oversized foliate console brackets (the western bracket shared with the adjoining house) supporting a shared lintel cornice and decorative segmental stone panel above. The door opens onto a cobblelock front garden enclosed by replacement steel railings on a brick wall.

The rear elevation is abutted by a shared two-storey return with cement rendered walling, enlarged window openings with uPVC windows and concrete sills, replacement timber glazed doors and steel steps giving access to the first floor. A small enclosed rear yard with screen wall opens into the rear garden. The east side elevation is abutted by adjoining house No.45.

The terrace was built as a development by Thomas Fitzpatrick on land he had purchased for the purpose. Fitzpatrick was described as a remarkable working sculptor responsible for many fine examples of stone carving on Belfast's buildings, including work on 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 to the west of the Ormeau Road was largely open until the latter decades of the nineteenth century, divided into spacious plots for large mansions but sparsely built on. The 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 very intensively developed, and what was once an isolated row of dwellings has been absorbed by Belfast's continued expansion.

The terrace first enters 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 then sold in pairs. Numbers 43 and 45 were sold to Thomas Neill, who occupied one and let out 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, passing through a number of landlords in quick succession, but both were let out. Occupants would appear to have been comfortable, employed as commercial travellers, clerks and shopkeepers; rarely able to afford a servant but generally involved in supervisory and clerical rather than manual work. 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 record. House numbering changed several times, making identification of individual occupants uncertain at times.

The first identified occupier of number 47 in 1870 was Anne Doran, followed by Robert K Taylor (1877), Mrs Ann Connor (1884) and Samuel Orr, bookkeeper (1896). By the 1901 census, Samuel Orr was still in residence, working as a bookkeeper at a linen house. He lived with his wife and four children, his eldest daughter of fifteen working as a monitress in a national school. Orr was followed by Adam Hampton, plumber (1903) and Robert Harvey Stevenson, dairyman (1910). Stevenson lived in the house with his wife and three adult children, his son also working as a dairyman and his elder daughter as a typist. Subsequent occupiers were John Hughes, joiner (1913), JJ Harris, baker (1915), and in 1921 Patrick Magee, a retired spirit merchant who died in 1926. Later occupiers included Thomas McCool, clerk (1928), G Loughrey, cinema manager (1929), Mrs M Shiels (1932), Patrick Shiels (1953), Miss C Shiels (1958) and in 1960 Miss J Shiels, who remained resident until at least 1980. The house continues in use as a domestic dwelling.