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

No. 14 McMaster Street is a two-storey-with-attic, single-bay late Victorian terraced house, built around 1896–1898 by John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son. It sits on the east side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast, close to the former Harland and Wolff shipyards. The house forms part of a complete, intact late Victorian terraced street and shares group value with the other listed buildings on McMaster Street.

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles. A central rooflight window sits on the west slope, and a modern red brick chimney stack rises at the south side. Painted ogee-profile cast-iron rainwater goods are supported on a projecting polychromatic brick eaves course over an ovolo-moulded corbel course.

The walls are laid in English garden-wall bond — red brick with alternating courses of headers and stretchers — and incorporate three polychromatic brick string courses, including a continuous brick-and-sill course at first floor level, with decorative detailing above the first floor windows. All polychromatic brickwork is now painted with the exception of that above the first floor windows. The window openings and door opening are camber-headed with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and have projecting masonry sills. The windows themselves are replacement square-headed 1-over-1 timber sliding sashes. The entrance door is a replacement timber panelled glazed door with a square-headed transom light.

The principal (west) elevation has the entrance door at the left, accessed by an original tiled threshold, with a window to its right. Two windows sit at first floor level, offset slightly to the right. The north gable abuts No. 12 McMaster Street, and the south gable abuts No. 16 McMaster Street. The rear elevation was not recorded during the survey, as neither access to the house and yard nor visibility from the entry was available.

The house sits at the north end of the east terrace. McMaster Street is wide, formerly cobbled and now largely laid in concrete with small cobbled areas at each end. The house opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs and original lamp posts retaining electric lighting converted from former gas lights. Original tiled street signage is present at both the north and south ends of the street. The rear of the property is enclosed by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling with a painted vertically-sheeted timber entrance door at the centre, accessed via a narrow entry running north to south between the back yards of Lendrick Street and McMaster Street. The street narrows towards Major Street to the south.

No. 14 first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of Belfast in 1902, which shows only Nos. 6 to 14 constructed on the eastern terrace at that time. Belfast Street Directories confirm that the western terrace (Nos. 1–37) was complete by 1898, while the remainder of the eastern terrace (Nos. 16–52) was not added until 1908. The land on which the street was built was wedge-shaped, meaning the houses and their yards became progressively smaller towards the far end of the street; No. 14 is consequently one of the larger houses on the terrace, with one of the larger rear yards.

The Belfast Revaluation of 1900 recorded No. 14 as a two-storey house with attic, measuring 13.6 feet wide by 25 feet deep and 24 feet in height, fitted with gas lighting and estimated to have cost £131 to construct. John McMaster, who originally owned the land on the south side of the Newtownards Road, let the house at a monthly rent of £1 8s. 4d. (£17 annually), with an 1899 valuation of £10 10s. The first recorded occupant was a Mrs. Parker. By 1901 a Methodist storekeeper named Robert Calvert had taken the house, followed shortly by a Mr. John Hughes. The 1901 Census Building Return described the property as a first-class dwelling with eight rooms; by the 1911 Census it was recorded as a second-class house with seven rooms, a reclassification repeated across Nos. 6–14.

By 1907 a Mr. James White was in occupation, followed in 1908 by Mr. John Larmour, a Presbyterian bookkeeper and cashier, who lived there with his brothers, employed at the shipyards as a plater and a machineworker. William McMurray, also a machineworker at the yards, had taken up residence by 1918 and continued there until the 1940s. The house's association with workers in the nearby shipyards and ropework industries was typical of the street as a whole.

By the end of the Annual Revisions in 1930, the value of No. 14 remained at £10 10s. The First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland in 1935 raised this to £15. McMaster Street escaped damage during the 1941 Belfast Blitz, when the Luftwaffe targeted the Belfast shipyards and caused extensive destruction to buildings and residential terraces along the Newtownards Road. After the war, the Second General Revaluation recorded that ownership of the street had passed from John McMaster to an L. McMaster (relationship unknown), and the value of No. 14 was reduced to £14 10s. During the revaluation period, between the 1950s and 1970s, Edward Carson — employed as a porter and bus conductor — was the recorded occupant.

McMaster Street was designed by John Frazer and Sons. The Dictionary of Irish Architects records Frazer as active between the 1890s and the second decade of the 20th century, and as designer of several other terraced streets in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place, both of which are similar in design to McMaster Street. Chadwick Street was built in 1899, shortly after the first phase of McMaster Street was complete.

The parlour houses on McMaster Street were constructed to new housing and planning regulations designed to improve living standards in Belfast. They were among the first late Victorian industrial terraces in Belfast to be supplied with running water and flushable toilets, made possible by the construction of a new city drainage system. Gas lighting was also piped into each house — a practice that, combined with the improved sanitary provision, distinguished McMaster Street from the more squalid housing typical of earlier Victorian Belfast. Electricity was not introduced to the street until the 1930s.

During the 1970s, the Ballymacarrett area underwent extensive redevelopment, with the demolition of many red brick terraces comparable to McMaster Street. McMaster Street survived as an intact remnant of late Victorian working-class housing. No. 14 was listed in 1987 along with the rest of the terrace, and in 1994 the neighbourhood was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment, with criteria established to ensure that any additions to the terrace remain in keeping with the original design and fabric of the street.