Former Station Master’s House, 2 Stockman's Lane, Belfast, Co Antrim., BT9 7JA

This is a former station master's house dating from around 1882, situated adjacent to Balmoral Station at the junction of Stockman's Lane and the minor road leading to Musgrave Park Hospital, in the townland of Malone Upper, Belfast. It is typical of the architectural style of the Great Northern Railway (Ireland) and of its Engineer-in-Chief, William Henry Mills. The building now serves as a private house and lies within a conservation area.

The house sits slightly below the level of the station but is elevated relative to the road. It has a landscaped garden on all sides and is accessed by a gated driveway from the south-west. A brick wall and timber fence separate the garden from the footpath leading up to the station's down line (Belfast direction).

The building is two storeys, three bays wide, and aligned north-east to south-west. Its most distinctive feature is the use of red brick enlivened by contrasting yellow brick on the quoins, on a platband running around the building at first-floor window-cill level, and on all the heads to the window and door openings. The roof is pitched and covered in artificial slate, with a skylight to the north-west pitch, projecting bargeboards with a decorative A-frame to the north-east gable, oversailing eaves with circular embellishments along their bottom edges, and half-round gutters of uncertain material. There is a low brick chimney at each gable apex, each carrying two octagonal yellow chimney stacks.

The principal south-east elevation is symmetrical. At ground-floor level the centre is occupied by a four-panel painted timber door with a semicircular overlight, flanked on each side by a two-over-two timber sliding sash window with a segmental head and painted cill. At first-floor level, directly above the door, a one-over-one sash window with a semicircular head is set within an eaves gablet. The north-west elevation has a two-over-two sash window at each end of the ground floor and two small one-over-one windows to the middle; above these, at an intermediate level likely corresponding to a staircase landing, there is a further two-over-two sash. The north-east gable has a two-over-two sash window at first-floor level; the ground floor of this gable was not observable. The south-west gable is now abutted by a two-storey link block connecting to a modern extension; there is a first-floor window to this gable and undoubtedly a through doorway at ground-floor level, though this was not visible.

The modern extension is aligned at ninety degrees to the original building and connected to it by a link block that is timber-sheeted at ground-floor level and glazed at first-floor level. The extension has a pitched profiled metal roof, plain cement-rendered walls, square-headed openings with uPVC fittings, and plastic rainwater goods.

The building is identical in style to the station master's house at Lisburn, also a work of Mills. The original roof has been replaced and the modern extension added; these are the principal recorded alterations.

Balmoral Station was opened in 1858 by the Ulster Railway Company, on the Belfast to Lisburn line which had opened in 1839 and was extended to Dublin in the 1850s. An early reference appears in the Belfast Newsletter of 22nd October 1858, in an advertisement for the sale of animals and agricultural produce at Meadowlands "adjacent to the Balmoral Station of the Ulster Railway". A fare dodger was recorded as being apprehended at the station in the same newspaper on 23rd June 1860. The station acted as a catalyst in the development of Belfast's southern suburbs well before the introduction of the Belfast Corporation's horse-drawn tram and trolley bus services, with building speculators from the early 1860s onwards regularly advertising the proximity of their developments to it.

Any buildings associated with the original 1850s station appear to have been fairly rudimentary, probably of timber construction, as they are not recorded in the valuation books of that period, suggesting the station at that time might more accurately be described as a halt. The first reference to permanent buildings appears in a valuation revision book entry of 1882, which records the Great Northern Railway as owning "Balmoral Railway Station and Station Master's House", with a rateable valuation of £30. The Great Northern Railway (Ireland) had been formed in 1876 by the amalgamation of the Ulster Railway Company and the Northern Railway Company (Ireland). William Henry Mills was appointed Engineer-in-Chief and undertook a major overhaul of the entire infrastructure. In 1903, Mills published a list of his works up to that date, recording the following at Balmoral: a new station building (one of 41 he constructed), a station master's house "of large size" (one of 29), a new signal cabin, and a new railway bridge over Stockman's Lane.

The 1887 street directory records William Wallace as Station Master, succeeded by R. Robinson by the mid-1890s. The 1895 Ordnance Survey 1:1,056 map shows the station master's house aligned north-east to south-west, with the station building lying parallel nearby on the down line. The site's rateable valuation rose from £30 to £54 in 1897; as the Ordnance Survey maps show no change in the buildings' footprints, this increase may reflect the transfer of this portion of Malone Upper townland from the Borough of Lisburn to Belfast. By 1911, the complex comprised the station master's house, station building with booking office and waiting rooms, platforms, signal cabins and apparatus, approaches, and fencing.

The opening of the Royal Ulster Agricultural Society's showgrounds at Balmoral in 1896 stimulated additional traffic, and sidings were constructed on the up line on the far side of the bridge. By the early 1900s there were up to ten trains a day on the Belfast to Lisburn section of the line. Due to the high volume of commuter traffic, the Great Northern Railway added a third line to the existing two tracks in 1907–08; however, this only reached as far as Balmoral and was not extended towards Lisburn, despite a triple-arch road bridge having been erected at Finaghy to accommodate it.

No photographs of the station master's house were found during the research for this record, though two photographs depicting the station building show a single-storey brick structure embellished with a yellow-brick platband. No remains of the station building are currently evident on the site. In later years the station master's house was used by the Superintendent of the Adelaide Goods Yards, located several hundred yards along the line in the Belfast direction. Operation of the line eventually passed to the Ulster Transport Authority, and the station became unmanned as part of Translink's network. The station master's house was subsequently sold and is now in private ownership. A large modern two-storey extension has been added to its south-west end in the relatively recent past.

Although the building is of interest as an example of Great Northern Railway architecture and has industrial archaeological value, the record notes that better examples exist elsewhere that are already listed.