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

Number 7 McMaster Street is a two-storey-with-attic, single-bay terraced house built around 1896, designed by J. Frazer and Son for developer John McMaster. It sits on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast, close to the former Harland and Wolff shipyards on Queen's Island.

The house is one of 37 parlour houses forming the only late Victorian terrace in Belfast to have survived in reasonable original condition. The terrace was constructed in several phases between 1899 and 1908, with the west-side houses (numbers 1 to 11, each two storeys plus an attic with a single-storey return) first entering valuation records in 1900. The street was built to new housing and planning regulations intended to improve living standards for the working-class population of Belfast at the turn of the twentieth century. These houses were built to a notably high specification, with running water and flush toilets — then emerging technologies for workers' housing — and were required by building controls to have a rear entrance, a back yard, and a toilet. Gas was piped in for lighting; electricity did not become commonplace until the 1930s.

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles. There is a central rooflight on the east slope and a modern red brick chimney stack at the south side. Painted ogee-profile cast-iron rainwater goods are supported on a projecting polychromatic brick eaves course set on 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 polychrome brickwork has been painted except for the section above the first-floor windows. Window openings and the door opening are set within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and projecting masonry sills. The windows are replacement uPVC casements and the door is a replacement timber panelled door.

The principal (east) elevation has the entrance at the right: a replacement timber panelled door with a square-headed transom light, accessed by a rendered threshold. A window sits to the left of the entrance at ground floor level. Two windows at first-floor level are offset slightly to the left. The north gable abuts Number 5 McMaster Street and the south gable abuts Number 9. The rear of the house was not accessible at the time of survey, but the rear elevation is enclosed by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling with a painted, vertically-sheeted timber entrance door at the centre, accessed via a narrow entry running north to south between the back yards of Parker Street and McMaster Street.

The street setting contributes significantly to the character of the building. McMaster Street is wide — formerly cobbled, now largely concrete with small cobbled areas remaining at each end. The house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs. Original lamp posts and electric lighting (formerly gas lights) remain in place, and original tiled street signage survives at both the north and south ends of the street. The street narrows towards Major Street at the south.

Number 7 was originally leased by Andrew Crothers, a rivetter. The 1900 valuation records it as four years old, though it is unlikely to have been more than two years old at that time. Numbers 1 to 11 were each valued at £10 10s, later reduced to £9 10s, possibly on appeal. The house contained four bedrooms and a sitting room and was fitted for gas. Monthly rent was £1 8s 4d (£17 per year, minus taxes), and the estimated cost of construction was £105. The 1901 census records Crothers living there with his wife and seven children aged between 1 and 25; the two older sons worked as shipwrights, the older daughter as a machinist, and a visiting relative from County Down was a dressmaker by profession. By 1902 the house was occupied by C. Cranston, and from 1903 William James Watson, a foreman boltmaker, began a long period of occupation. The 1911 census records Watson — described as a blacksmith at works — living with his wife and six children, three older daughters aged 16, 17 and 26 working as seamstresses.

The Watson 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 was not destroyed, but the area was targeted in raids on the nights of 7/8 April and 4/5 May 1941. The 1942 street directory records that most houses in the street had been vacated — including Number 3, probably due to fire damage — though by 1943 the majority of residents had returned. The Watson family did not return, and the house was taken over by Charles Rogers, a stager, whose occupation involved erecting the tall wooden platforms surrounding vessels on which riveters, platers, and other tradesmen worked. Subsequent occupiers included R. S. McKay, plumber (1958), and A. J. Poole, driver (1965).

The wider area of Ballymacarrett had been largely fields, cottages, and mansions around an industrial core in the mid-nineteenth century, but was gradually built over with terraced housing as the shipbuilding and associated industries — including ropeworks, linen manufacture, engineering, and fertiliser production — expanded. Harland and Wolff's shipyard on Queen's Island employed 9,000 men by 1900. J. Frazer and Son, the architects, were active from the 1890s to the 1910s and designed a number of similar terraced streets in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place. In the 1970s redevelopment led to the demolition of many of the other terraces in the area. McMaster Street was listed in 1987 and designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment in 1994. Two houses in the street have been restored by Hearth. Number 7 has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street and is of local interest.