13 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

Number 13 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house that retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting, constructed between 1860 and 1879.

THE TERRACE AND ITS SETTING

Number 13 is one of a terrace of six mid-Victorian two-storey dwellings with dormered roofs, numbered 5 to 15. The terrace looks out onto semi-communal gardens. Some houses have access via an entry at the rear of 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 houses 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 terrace's setting.

THE PRINCIPAL ELEVATION

The front elevation is of fair-faced brick laid in Flemish bond, using red brick with colour variations that give an attractive brindled appearance. The end houses have quoins — though these have been lost on number 15 — and the central house, number 11, also has quoins, creating a slightly skewed but unified composition across the terrace frontage.

The front entrance to number 13 has a stucco surround with narrow pilasters rising on each side of the door to large console brackets, which support a moulded projecting cornice. An undecorated frieze links the brackets beneath the cornice and forms the entrance lintel. Above the cornice, a curious flat plaster pediment completes the entrance surround.

The front door is a four-panel painted timber design with bolection mouldings. The lower two panels are raised; the upper two are glazed with replacement glass and have three-centred shallow arched heads that echo the adjacent ground floor window. Above the door is a simple rectangular fanlight.

The ground floor front window has a moulded stucco surround with a three-centred shallow arched head. The fenestration consists of a sliding sash horizontally divided into two over two panes, with vertical margin panes. The first floor window openings are plain, with painted reveals and brick flat-arched heads, and are also fitted with timber sliding sash windows divided two over two with vertical margin panes. A considerable amount of original crown glass survives in this house.

At eaves level, a flat plain painted frieze four courses deep is surmounted by a square-section projecting cornice that carries an ogee cast iron gutter. The cornice is decorated with four pairs of simple rectangular modillions.

THE ROOF AND DORMERS

The roof features a dormer with a three-pilastered front framing two small sliding sash windows with shallow arched heads under a simple cornice. The bargeboards are scalloped and surmounted by a finial, and the cheeks are tile-hung. The chimneys are plain and plastered, with a simple square moulded cornice and round clay pots.

THE REAR ELEVATION

The rear elevation has been rendered. The ground and first floor principal rear wall retains large sliding sash windows with six-over-six glazing. The return has smaller one-over-one sliding sash windows, with the exception of the larger landing window, which has six-over-six glazing.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

At the beginning of the 19th century the present Malone Road was the main route south from Belfast to Dublin, climbing along the Malone ridge and heading south-west towards Lisburn. Stretching westwards from this road and sloping down toward 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 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, perpetual leases began to be granted by the Donegall estate 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, with the construction of small country villas surrounded by spacious gardens, many occupying the former farm strips between the Malone and the new Lisburn Road. Travelling southwards, these included 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 (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 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 recorded as holding the lease of the plot they were 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 occupant of the newly built number 9; number 11 was 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 west end of the block, appears originally to have been entered via a porch in the gable.

In 1862, Lowry subdivided the land to the rear of these houses, which had been recorded 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 across all the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events in the years immediately following 1860 is complex, with the valuations containing numerous undated and overlapping notes and incompletely annotated maps. 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 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 — 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 by 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. One would assume this work was carried out in or shortly after 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 from 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of these maps is questionable — they do not show numbers 5 to 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 an intended square; however, as the development history demonstrates, it was in fact a piecemeal undertaking by different individuals, with no evidence of any grander scheme. The large garden immediately to the south belonging to Eglantine Hill, which remained largely untouched until the later 1880s, would in any case have made such a grand plan impractical. The fact that the houses ultimately ended up sandwiched between two larger terraces is a consequence of the eventual complete disposal of the Eglantine Hill grounds, when the developers of that land found it more convenient to create a new broad thoroughfare to the south — the present Eglantine Avenue.