3 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

No. 3 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house built in 1854, forming one half of a pair of semi-detached two-storey double dwellings that continue Wellington Park Terrace along the eastern side of the entrance road. It retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting.

The building is rendered and unpainted. The front entrance has a stucco surround with a painted architrave capped by console brackets supporting a moulded projecting cornice. An undecorated frieze links the brackets beneath the cornice and forms the entrance lintel. The front door is a painted timber design with two vertical panels and bolection mouldings. Above the door is a simple rectangular fanlight. The windows have no external mouldings and are sliding sash with horizontally divided two-over-two glazing with vertical margin panes. The roof has plain projecting eaves with a small fascia board and an ogee gutter. There are no dormers and no attic floor. The chimney is plain plastered with a simple square moulding and decorated yellow clay pots.

The principal rear elevation has lost its original ground-floor windows, but the first floor retains its sliding sash windows with horizontally divided two-over-two glazing.

The terrace looks out onto a semi-communal garden. Some houses have rear access onto the entry behind 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 properties this is the only means of reaching the front door. The large semi-communal green space, uninterrupted by driveways or paths, gives a unique character to the setting of the terrace.

The house sits within a townland of Malone, within a conservation area, and is privately owned.

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 twisting south-west towards Lisburn. Long, narrow strip farms stretched westwards from this road, sloping down to 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 farmed 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, the Donegall estate began granting leases in perpetuity on 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 genteel, consisting of small country villas surrounded by spacious gardens, many of them 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 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 next 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 shown that nos. 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 (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 is recorded 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 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 what was then the west 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 nos. 24 and 26 Wellington Park. By this 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 turnover of tenants in all the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events in the years immediately following 1860 is complicated, with the valuations full of undated overlapping notes and accompanying maps not fully annotated. It is clear, however, that nos. 5–7 were the next to be built, again by John Lowry, with a Thomas Frazer responsible for the development of nos. 17–21. The precise dating is uncertain, but an analysis of the handwriting styles of the various valuers — and their inadvertent use of subtly different ink colours — suggests that 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 that all were present at that point.

Some time after the building of nos. 17–21, no. 15 was extended to join with no. 17, creating an unbroken terrace from no. 3 to no. 21. It would be natural to assume this work was carried out around or shortly after 1869, when no. 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 Co.'s maps of Belfast from 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of these maps is questionable — they do not show nos. 5–7 either — but it is nonetheless notable that the valuations record no alterations to the property. The detailing to the door screen appears to post-date 1880, though this could of course have been changed at a later stage.

It has been suggested that the terrace was built as the first part of what was intended to be a square. As the development history demonstrates, however, the terrace was built piecemeal by different individuals, with no evidence of any grander scheme. The large garden to the immediate south belonging to Eglantine Hill, which remained largely untouched until the later 1880s, would in any case have prohibited such a plan. The houses ultimately ended up sandwiched between two larger terraces as a consequence of the developers of the 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.