9 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

9 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house, built between 1858 and 1860, that retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace group within a conservation area in the Malone townland of Belfast.

TERRACE SETTING AND CONTEXT

No. 9 forms part of a terrace of six mid-Victorian two-storey dwellings with dormered roofs, numbered 5 to 15. The terrace looks out onto semi-communal gardens. Some houses have rear access via an entry at the back of the north side of Eglantine Avenue, but for all houses the principal pedestrian access is by way of a shared path running parallel to the front of the terrace — for some houses this is the only route to the front door. The large semi-communal green space, uninterrupted by driveways or paths, gives the setting a unique character.

EXTERIOR

The front and principal elevation is of fair-faced brick in Flemish bond, using red brick with colour variations that give an attractive brindled appearance. The end houses have quoins (lost on No. 15), and the central house, No. 11, also has quoins, creating a slightly skewed but unified composition across the terrace front.

The front entrance to No. 9 has a stucco surround with narrow pilasters on each side of the door, rising to large console brackets that support a moulded projecting cornice. An undecorated frieze links the brackets beneath the cornice and forms the entrance lintel. Above the cornice, a curious flat plaster pediment, unpainted, completes the entrance surround. The front door itself is a replacement, with two lower panels and a glazed 12-pane upper section with an integral fanlight; above the door is a simple rectangular fanlight.

The ground floor front window has a moulded stucco surround with a three-centred shallow arched head. The glazing is a sliding sash horizontally divided into two over two panes, with vertical margin panes. The first floor window openings are plain, with painted reveals and brick flat-arched heads; their fenestration is also timber sliding sash, horizontally divided two over two with vertical margin panes. A considerable amount of original crown glass survives in this house.

At eaves level, a flat plain painted frieze four brick courses deep is surmounted by a square-section projecting cornice carrying an ogee cast-iron gutter. The cornice is decorated with four pairs of simple rectangular modillions.

The roof has a dormer with a three-pilastered front framing two small sliding sash windows with shallow arched heads beneath a simple cornice. The bargeboards are scalloped and topped with a finial, and the cheeks are tile-hung. The chimneys are plain plastered with a simple square moulded cornice and ornamented yellow clay pots.

The rear elevation has been rendered. The ground floor principal rear wall retains large sliding sash windows with six over six glazing. The remainder of the rear elevation has original two over two horizontally divided sliding sash windows.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

At the beginning of the 19th century, the present Malone Road was the main route south from Belfast to Dublin, climbing along the Malone ridge and turning south-west towards Lisburn. Long, narrow strip farms stretched westwards from this road, sloping down towards the lower ground of the Bog Meadows. From the mid-18th century, many of these farms were leased by the Donegall estate to Belfast merchants and worked by under-tenants, whose largely humble farmhouses were scattered along the road. In 1819, the present Lisburn Road was laid out, cutting through the farms, and by 1839 the Ulster Railway had been driven through their lower fields. From 1823, the Donegall estate began granting perpetual leases on land to the south of Belfast, and with the unity of the Malone farms thus broken, the area became open to developers.

The first wave of development was relatively modest and decidedly genteel: small country villas surrounded by spacious gardens, many occupying the former farm strips between the Malone and the new Lisburn Road. Travelling southwards, these included Fountainville Cottage (near today's Fountainville Avenue), Elm Wood (roughly where Queen's University Belfast's Students' Union now stands), Vermont (on the site of the present Methodist College), Wellington Park Cottage (in the present Wellington Park area), Eglantine Hill (in the present Eglantine Avenue area), Windsor, and Derryvolgie (around what are now Windsor and Derryvolgie Avenues respectively).

In the later 1840s and 1850s, following the establishment of Queen's College in the vicinity and the beginnings of the movement of Belfast's rising merchant classes out of the town centre, portions of the grounds of many of these properties began to be sold off for the building of groups of relatively grand terraced and semi-detached dwellings. The development of Wellington Park and Wellington Park Terrace was part of this expansion, which over the course of the following forty or so years led to the establishment of the University and Malone area suburbs as they exist today.

Research by Stephen Carleton has shown that Nos. 1 and 3 of what was to become Wellington Park Terrace were built in 1854, recorded in the valuation of 1858 as occupied by a Frances Ogilby (No. 1) and William Ferguson (No. 3), both leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22. Annotations within the same valuation book show that Nos. 9 to 15 were built between 1858 and 1860. The man responsible for their construction was John Lowry, a watchmaker with premises in High Street; in 1858 he is recorded as holding the lease of the plot from George Tate, a timber merchant and major landholder in the area after whom Tate's Avenue is named. Lowry himself was the first occupant of the newly built No. 9, with No. 11 first occupied by a Henrietta Walsh, No. 13 by James S. Sheerer, and No. 15 by an Andrew Munce, all dwellings valued at £13. No. 15, at the then western end of the block, appears originally to have been entered via a porch in the gable.

In 1862, Lowry subdivided the land to the rear of these houses, which had been recorded as being in pasture, and sub-let it to a Nathaniel Greer, who by the end of the following year had built the present Nos. 24 and 26 Wellington Park. By that stage a Mary Pollock and a Mary Anne Kearney had become the occupants of Nos. 13 and 15 respectively. In the early years, the rate of tenant turnover across all the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events immediately following 1860 is complex, with the valuations containing undated overlapping notes and maps not fully annotated. It is clear, however, that Nos. 5 to 7 were built next, again by John Lowry, with a Thomas Frazer responsible for the development of Nos. 17 to 21. The precise dating is uncertain, but an analysis of handwriting styles and ink colours used by various valuers suggests all may have been in place by 1869, though this is not certain as the street directory of 1870 appears to list only six houses. All eleven properties are recorded in the directory of 1877, and the use of the name Wellington Park Terrace in a Belfast City Corporation minute of 1874 suggests all were present by that date.

Some time after the building of Nos. 17 to 21, No. 15 was extended to join with No. 17, creating an unbroken terrace from No. 3 to No. 21. This work would logically have been carried out at or shortly after around 1869 when No. 17 itself was built. However, the valuations make no mention of any extension prior to at least 1883, and a gap is shown in the terrace on Marcus Ward and Co.'s maps of Belfast for 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of these maps is questionable — they do not show Nos. 5 to 7 either — but it is notable that the valuations record no alterations. The detailing of the door surround appears to post-date 1880, though this could of course have been changed at a later date.

It has been suggested that the terrace was conceived as the first part of an intended square, but the evidence shows the development was piecemeal, undertaken by different individuals, with no evidence of any grander scheme. The large garden immediately to the south belonging to Eglantine Hill, which remained largely untouched until the later 1880s, would have prevented any such grand plan in any case. The houses ultimately became sandwiched between two larger terraces as a consequence of the eventual complete sale of the Eglantine Hill grounds, when developers found it more convenient to create the present Eglantine Avenue as a new broad thoroughfare to the south.