15 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

No. 15 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house, constructed between 1858 and 1860, that retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting in the Malone area of south Belfast.

SETTING AND TERRACE COMPOSITION

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

No. 15 was originally the end house of the terrace, and its main entrance would have been via a lobby on the gable end. After nos. 17–21 were built (by 1869 at the latest), the gap between nos. 15 and 17 was closed by an extension to no. 15, eventually creating an unbroken terrace running from no. 3 to no. 21.

PRINCIPAL ELEVATION

The front elevation is constructed in fair-faced brick laid in Flemish bond, using a red brick with colour variations that give an attractive brindled appearance. The end house, no. 5, has quoins, though these are absent on no. 15. The central house, no. 11, also has quoins, forming a slightly asymmetric but unified composition across the terrace front.

The front entrance to no. 15 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 flat plaster pediment completes the entrance surround. The detailing matches the entrances to nos. 5–13 but is wider. The front door is a four-panel painted timber design with bolection mouldings; the lower two panels are solid, while the upper two panels are glazed with square heads. Above the door is a simple rectangular fanlight, and to either side are glazed sidelights. All the glass to the door and surrounds is leaded coloured glass.

The two ground-floor front windows have moulded stucco surrounds with three-centred shallow arched heads. The fenestration consists of sliding sash windows horizontally divided into two over two, with vertical margin panes. The first-floor window openings are plainer, with painted reveals and brick flat-arched heads, and are also fitted with timber sliding sash windows divided into two over two with vertical margin panes.

At eaves level, a flat plain painted frieze four 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 more recent extension to the cornice over the entrance has no modillions.

ROOF AND DORMERS

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 surmounted by a finial. The extension has a flat roof and a small roof terrace. The chimneys are plain plastered with a simple square moulded cornice and clay round pots.

REAR ELEVATION AND RETURN

The rear elevation has been partially rendered and painted. The return is now flanked by small yards; the larger of these (the original yard) has been converted into a conservatory with the addition of a glazed roof. The first-floor principal rear wall retains large sliding sash windows with horizontally divided two-over-two glazing and vertical margin panes. The return at first-floor level has original two-over-two horizontally divided sliding sash windows.

It is worth noting that no. 11, which is of the same date as the other houses in the original group, differs from its neighbours in having an original three-storey return.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

At the beginning of the 19th century, the present Malone Road was the main route south from Belfast to Dublin, running along the Malone ridge and turning south-west towards Lisburn. Long, narrow strip farms stretched westwards from the road, sloping down towards the lower ground of the Bog Meadows. In the mid-18th century many of these farms were leased by the Donegall estate to Belfast merchants and worked by under-tenants, whose largely modest farmhouses were scattered along the roadside. 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 onwards, perpetual leases began to be granted by the Donegall estate for land to the south of Belfast, and with the unity of the Malone farms thus destroyed the area became open to developers.

The first wave of development was relatively modest and distinctly genteel, consisting of small country villas set in spacious gardens, many occupying the former farm strips between the Malone and the new Lisburn Road. These included, travelling southwards, Fountainville Cottage (near the present Fountainville Avenue), Elm Wood (roughly where Queen's University Belfast 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), and 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 nearby 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 construction 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 following forty years or so led to the establishment of the suburbs of the University and Malone area as they exist today.

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

In 1862, Lowry subdivided the land to the rear of these houses — noted at that time 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.

Nos. 5–7 were subsequently built by John Lowry once more, while a Thomas Frazer was responsible for the development of nos. 17–21. The precise dating is uncertain, but analysis of handwriting styles and ink colours in the valuation records suggests all may have been in place by 1869; the street directory of 1870 appears to list only six houses, however, while all eleven properties appear in the directory of 1877. The use of the name "Wellington Park Terrace" in a Belfast City Corporation minute of 1874 suggests the full terrace was present by that point.

Some time after the building of nos. 17–21, no. 15 was extended to join with no. 17, creating a continuous terrace from no. 3 to no. 21. It might be assumed this was carried out around 1869 when no. 17 itself was built, but 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 from 1884 and 1888 — though the accuracy of those maps is questionable, as they also omit nos. 5–7. The detailing to the door screen appears post-1880, though this could of course have been altered at a later stage.

It has been suggested that the terrace was originally intended to form the first part of a square, but the evidence demonstrates that the development was piecemeal, undertaken by different individuals, with no evidence of any grander underlying scheme. The large garden of Eglantine Hill immediately to the south remained largely untouched until the later 1880s, which would in any case have prohibited any such grand plan. The fact that the houses ultimately ended up sandwiched between two larger terraces is a consequence of the developers of the former Eglantine Hill grounds finding it more convenient, when those grounds were eventually sold off, to create a new broad thoroughfare to the south — the present Eglantine Avenue.