21 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

Number 21 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house, built between 1860 and 1879, that retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting within a conservation area.

SETTING AND TERRACE CONTEXT

Number 21 is the end house of a sub-terrace of three dwellings (numbers 17 to 21), which together form the western end of a longer terrace of nine houses (numbers 5 to 21). A further two houses, numbers 1 and 3, are part of the same terrace but are separated from the others by a laneway. Numbers 17 to 21 share a pedestrian access off the main Wellington Park Terrace road, and the terrace as a whole looks out onto individual front gardens. The large, semi-communal nature of the green space, uninterrupted by driveways or paths, gives a unique character to the setting.

EXTERIOR — FRONT ELEVATION

The front principal elevation is built in fair-faced brick laid in Flemish bond, using a red brick with colour variations that gives an attractive brindled appearance. The composition is asymmetric, with the two first-floor windows not in alignment with the ground-floor entrance door and window below them.

Door and window heads have flat but segmental brick-and-a-half arches, with squint headers forming an eyebrow course above each opening. The door arch has a stucco keystone, and squint stretchers form the central part of the soffit of each arch. At first-floor cill level there is a stucco string course, beneath which runs a string course of headers alternating with squint headers. At eaves level, four courses of pale cream Flemish bond bricks are carried on a corbel course of headers alternating with squint headers, all together forming a cornice.

All three front windows are two-over-two vertically divided sliding sashes in white painted timber, with minimal exposure of the frames. The front door appears to be original, with four panels bearing bolection mouldings in timber, painted red, and a rectangular fanlight above.

The roof features an original central dormer with a pitched slated roof and finial. The dormer has overhanging eaves and a one-over-one sliding sash window in white painted timber. The main roof slopes are covered in natural slate, presumed to be Welsh. There is no end chimney; the chimney on the party wall with number 19 is presumably shared. It is finished in facing brick similar to the front elevation, rising in two stages with the top four courses forming a corbel, and is topped with round clay pots, most of which are original.

At the junction of the gable with the front elevation, chamfered and staggered quoins are struck out. The gable and north face of the back return are finished in unpainted cement render.

EXTERIOR — BACK RETURN AND REAR ELEVATIONS

The back return elevation facing Wellington Park Terrace has two first-floor window openings of similar size to those on the front elevation. These are two-over-two horizontally divided sliding sashes with minimal exposure of frames in white painted timber. On the same return elevation, aligning with the right-hand first-floor window, there is a smaller window opening with six-over-six sliding sashes and full exposure of frames in white painted timber.

The main rear elevation is finished in cement roughcast. There is a sliding sash window at first-floor level, and at roof level a small flat-roofed dormer with slate-hung cheeks and a front comprising a pair of side-hung casements.

There is a three-storey back return with a pitched slated roof. The top storey is in red facing clay brick while the lower storey is in painted cement render; the top brick storey has probably been added in recent decades. The gable of this brick storey has two window openings with concrete cills and exposed concrete lintels, fitted with two-over-two horizontally divided sliding sashes in painted timber with partial exposure of the frames.

At first-floor level the return has two original window openings facing into the small enclosed yard of number 19, with two-over-two horizontally divided sliding sashes in painted timber with partial exposure of frames. On the south side of the return, a similar window faces into the yard of number 17. The rear yard is enclosed by a rendered wall with a security railing above.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

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 twisting south-west towards Lisburn. Stretching westwards from this road and sloping down towards the lower ground of the Bog Meadows were long, narrow strip farms. 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 humble farmhouses were scattered along the road itself. In 1819 the present Lisburn Road was laid out, slicing through the farms, and by 1839 the Ulster Railway had been cut through their lower fields. From 1823 onwards, leases in perpetuity began to be granted by the Donegall estate over land to the south of Belfast; with the unity of the Malone farms thus destroyed, the area became open to developers.

The first wave of development was relatively modest and decidedly gentrified, with the building of small country villas surrounded by spacious gardens, many occupying the former farm strips between the Malone and the new Lisburn Road. Among these, travelling southwards, were Fountainville Cottage (close to today's Fountainville Avenue), Elm Wood (roughly where the Queen's University Students' Union now stands), Vermont (on the site of the present Methodist College), Wellington Park Cottage (in the present Wellington Park area), Eglantine Hill (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 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 next forty years or so led to the establishment of the suburbs of the University and Malone area seen today.

Research by Stephen Carleton has shown that numbers 1 and 3 of what was to become Wellington Park Terrace were built in 1854. They are recorded in the valuation of 1858 as occupied by a Frances Ogilby (number 1) and William Ferguson (number 3), both properties leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22. Annotations within the same valuation book show that numbers 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 noted as holding the lease of the plot they were later to fill from George Tate, a timber merchant and major landholder in the area after whom Tate's Avenue is named. Lowry himself was the first to live in the newly built number 9, with number 11 first occupied by a Henrietta Walsh, number 13 by James S. Sheerer, and number 15 by an Andrew Munce, with all dwellings valued at £13. Number 15, at the then western end of the block, appears to have been originally entered via a porch to the gable.

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

The sequence of events in the years immediately following 1860 is confusing, with the valuations full of undated overlapping notes and accompanying maps not fully annotated. It is clear, however, that numbers 5 to 7 were the next to be built, again by John Lowry, with a Thomas Frazer responsible for the development of numbers 17 to 21, the sub-terrace of which number 21 forms the end house. The precise dating is not certain, but an analysis of handwriting styles and ink colours in the various valuers' records 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 at that point.

Some time after the building of numbers 17 to 21, number 15 was extended to join with number 17, creating an unbroken terrace from number 3 to number 21. This work would be assumed to date from around 1869 when number 17 itself was built; however, the valuations make no mention of any such extension prior to at least 1883, and a gap is shown in the terrace on Marcus Ward and Company's maps of Belfast dated 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of those maps is questionable — they do not show numbers 5 to 7 either — but it is notable that the valuations record no alterations to the property. The detailing to the door screen looks post-1880, though this could of course have been changed at a later date.

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