Belfast School of Music, 99 Donegall Pass, Belfast, County Antrim, BT7 1DR

Belfast School of Music, 99 Donegall Pass, is a three-storey modernist former school built between 1934 and 1936 to the designs of Reginald S. Wilshere, architect to Belfast Corporation Education Committee. The contractor was Thomas McKee and Sons. It stands prominently at the junction of Donegall Pass and Oak Street, on the south side of Donegall Pass, south of the city centre and east of Shaftesbury Square.

The building has a U-shaped floor plan enclosing a yard to the west. It is flat-roofed with a synthetic rubber finish, parapets, and concrete coping stones, with cast-iron rainwater goods. The walls are red brick laid in English garden wall bond with a moulded pre-cast concrete plinth. Windows are a mix of steel-framed Crittall and timber-framed casements, both with horizontal glazing bars, set within pre-cast concrete cills and surrounds, with metal grilles protecting the ground-floor glazing. The main entrance door is timber with chevron mouldings and is framed by step-moulded pre-cast concrete surrounds.

The principal, north-facing elevation is symmetrically arranged. The front door sits centrally, flanked on each side by sexpartite windows divided by mullions with horizontal glazing bars. Above the door is a geometrical horizontal ventilation grille. A projecting concrete Juliet balcony with an alternating projecting brick course balustrade and a concrete coping sits above the entrance. Rising from behind the balcony are three unbroken narrow vertical glazed strips spanning two floors, separated by two single-brick-wide plain projecting pilasters and flanked by two-and-a-half-brick-wide pilasters, all terminated with coping blocks. Modern signage is located to the left, and there is a single-brick-deep projection at the far left.

The east elevation is asymmetrically arranged, with each floor following the same fenestration pattern: a single horizontal window to the left and a single large Crittall window extending from left of centre to the far right, with continuous cills and heads. The rear, south-facing elevation is also asymmetrically arranged. A secondary door sits centrally at ground-floor level, with two small windows to its left and a single large window to the right. Projecting balconies matching those on the principal elevation are positioned left of centre on the first and second floors, each with a single window to the balcony and a tripartite landing window to the left. Large Crittall windows sit to the right, partially infilled at first-floor level. The parapet steps up by approximately one metre to the left.

The west elevation, which encloses the courtyard on three sides, is finished in painted render and has uniformly arranged timber bipartite casement windows with horizontal glazing bars, a replacement door centred at ground-floor level, and horizontal overlights between the ground and first floors. The north and south faces of this courtyard range are also painted render with horizontal window strips to each floor, surmounted by access stairs to the roof terrace.

The external fabric and character of the building has remained substantially unaltered. Internally, the general floor plan is retained along with a partially intact early 20th-century interior.

The building sits within a small paved entrance area bounded by metal railings, piers and gates. The west elevation is partially abutted by three-storey housing. Opposite the school is a Victorian terrace and the former School of Music annex block, beyond which the surrounding area is largely two- and two-and-a-half-storey residential.

The present building replaced the McQuiston National School, named after Presbyterian merchant and benefactor W. J. McQuiston, which had occupied the site from 1869. The new building was first recorded on the seventh-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1938 and entered into valuation records in 1937 at a valuation of £275.

Reginald Wilshere arrived in Belfast from Essex in 1926 to take up his post as architect to Belfast Education Committee. According to architectural historian Paul Larmour, he transformed school design in the city: between the wars he built a total of 26 schools in which air, light and sunshine were provided in abundance, and spaciousness and cheerfulness were the dominant characteristics, making these the first modern schools to be built anywhere in Ireland. Features now considered standard were innovations at the time, including a single classroom for each class, a large assembly hall, and dedicated rooms for science, cookery and art. Great attention was paid to ventilation — achieved through cross-ventilation and open-air corridors — and to lighting arrangements. On cramped sites such as Donegall Pass, playground provision was sometimes made on the roof. The McQuiston Memorial School has been identified as demonstrating the influence of Dutch architect Willem Dudok on Wilshere's work, particularly in its weightiness, the interplay of verticals and horizontals, and the use of large blank areas of brickwork.

This programme of school-building was a direct response to the very poor condition of Belfast's schools at the time. A 1924 survey of elementary schools by Belfast Education Committee found only 6 satisfactory out of 194. The Committee commented that "the great majority of the remainder would not be tolerated in any other part of the United Kingdom. There are about forty of these schools which are a direct menace to the health and physical development of the children and it is almost doubtful whether the children attending them would not be better in the street." In 1930, Wilshere was awarded the first RIBA Ulster Architecture Medal for his school at Strandtown. The Irish Builder recorded his philosophy as follows: "Mr Wilshere's own idea...is that if the children of a district have no beauty in their daily surroundings, they need beauty all the more in their schools." During the Second World War, Wilshere supervised the repair of bomb-damaged schools and housing. He then oversaw a second wave of school building following the 1947 Education Act, bringing his total number of school designs to 39. The building has group value with other listed schools designed by Wilshere, including Nettlefield, Avoniel and Blythestreet schools.

In the 1950s, the City of Belfast appointed a Music Adviser, Douglas Dawn, who inaugurated the City of Belfast Youth Orchestra in 1955. In 1965, his successor Leonard Pugh opened the City of Belfast School of Music in the present building. The School began with three full-time teachers and thirty part-time tutors, who travelled to schools and provided individual tuition in the evenings. It grew to employ 16 full-time teachers and two hundred part-time tutors providing music tuition to around 3,000 young people. Among the many celebrated former pupils are Sir James Galway, Professor David Strange, Kenneth Montgomery, Angela Feeney, Barry Douglas, Kevin Mallon, Peter Corry and Katie Melua. The School of Music moved to new premises at Fortwilliam Park, North Belfast in 2009, and the Donegall Pass building has since been vacant.