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

31 McMaster Street is a two-storey, single-bay late Victorian terraced house, built around 1896–1898 on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast. It was developed by John McMaster to designs by the architectural practice J. Frazer and Son, who were active between the 1890s and 1910s and responsible for a number of similar terraced streets in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place. Number 31 sits at the south end of the west terrace block and, as a wider end-of-terrace plot, is slightly shallower and broader than most of the other houses in the street, owing to the tapering nature of the land on which the terrace was built. It has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street.

McMaster Street is the only late Victorian workers' terrace in Belfast to have survived in reasonably original condition. The street was built in several phases between 1899 and 1908 and comprises 37 parlour houses in total. It was constructed close to the Harland and Wolff shipyards on Queen's Island, which employed 9,000 men by 1900, and the wider Ballymacarrett area was also home to ropeworks, linen manufacture, engineering and fertiliser businesses. By the later 19th century this district, which had previously been fields, cottages and mansions around an industrial core, had become dense rows of terraces housing the workers who drove Belfast's prosperity. McMaster Street first enters valuation records in 1900 and the houses on the western side were built to a notably high specification for workers' housing of the period, including running water and flush toilets. They also benefitted from building regulations requiring a rear entrance, a back yard, and a toilet. Gas was piped in for lighting; electricity did not become commonplace until the 1930s, and lamp-lighters and window-tappers were daily visitors to the street. The male inhabitants were often employed in shipbuilding, and female residents frequently worked in the linen or rope industries.

The first recorded occupant of number 31 was Jane McKibbin, who leased the house from developer John McMaster. In the 1901 census she appears as a widow living with her four children and her sister; the older children worked as a tobacco stripper, a grocer's assistant and a messenger, while her sister was a reeler in a steam mill. The house at that time contained three bedrooms, was fitted with gas, and commanded a weekly rent of five shillings, with an estimated construction cost of £76. Numbers 13 to 37 — all two-storey houses and yards — were valued at £8, slightly less than the larger houses at the north end of the street, which have an additional attic storey. A succession of tenants followed: Henry Smith, labourer (1905); William Mahood, guard, who later moved to number 17; Charles Bennett, joiner (1909); and Edward McMeekin, marine engineer, who was resident at the 1911 census with his wife and three young children. Subsequent tenants included James Buckley, bricklayer (1913); F. Moore, joiner (1915); and W. A. Hewitt, caulker (1938). The Hewitt family was forced to leave during the Belfast Blitz: four air raids struck Belfast in April and May 1941, damaging over half the city's housing stock. Although McMaster Street was not destroyed, it was affected by raids on 7–8 April and 4–5 May 1941, and the 1942 street directory records that most houses in the street had been vacated, likely due to fire damage in the surrounding area. By 1943 the majority of residents, including the Hewitts, had returned; Mrs Ada Hewitt is noted as householder that year. In the early 1970s the house was vacant for a period before being taken over by Robert Beck in 1977, who lived there until at least 1980. In the 1970s, redevelopment led to the demolition of many other terraces in the area, but McMaster Street was listed in 1987 and the surrounding area was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment in 1994. Two houses in the street have since been restored by Hearth.

Architecturally, the house is constructed in English garden-wall bond red brick, with alternating courses of headers and stretchers, and features two polychromatic brick string courses, one of which forms a continuous brick-and-sill course at first-floor level. The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles and a red brick chimney stack to the south side. Rainwater goods are painted ogee-profile cast iron, supported on a projecting polychromatic brick eaves course over an ovolo-moulded corbel course. Window openings and the doorway are set within camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and have projecting masonry sills. First-floor windows are one-over-one timber sliding sashes. Ground-floor windows are boarded. The door is a replacement timber panelled door with a camber-headed transom light. The principal east-facing elevation is symmetrical, with the entrance door at the centre, accessed via a tiled threshold, and flanked by a single window opening (now blocked) on each side, each surmounted by a window at first-floor level. Paint has been removed from all brickwork, including the plinth, the brick chamfered reveals, and the camber-headed window reveals.

The north gable abuts number 29 McMaster Street and the south gable abuts number 33 McMaster Street. To the rear, an enclosed yard is accessed from a narrow entry running north–south between the back yards of Parker Street and McMaster Street, via a timber-sheeted entrance door set in high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling. The rear elevation is not otherwise visible from the entry. The house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs. The street, formerly cobbled, is now largely concrete with small cobbled areas at each end. Original lamp posts and electric lighting (converted from former gas lights) remain in place, as does original tiled street signage at the north and south ends. The street narrows towards Major Street to the south.