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

33 McMaster Street is a two-storey, single-bay late Victorian terrace house, built around 1896–1898 on the west side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast. It was developed by John McMaster and designed by J. Frazer and Son, a practice active between the 1890s and 1910s who were also responsible for similar terraced streets elsewhere in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place. Number 33 sits at the south end of the west-side terrace block and, being a wider end-of-terrace unit, occupies a slightly shallower and broader plan than the houses further north, owing to the tapering nature of the plot on which the terrace was laid out.

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles and a red brick chimney stack on the south side. Rainwater goods are ogee-profile cast iron, painted, and supported on a projecting polychromatic brick eaves course over an ovolo-moulded corbel course. The walls are laid in English garden-wall bond — alternating courses of headers and stretchers — in red brick, with two polychromatic brick string courses running horizontally across the facade, one of which forms a continuous brick and sill course at first-floor level. Window openings are camber-headed, with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs and projecting masonry sills. As of the 2013 description, paint had been removed from all brickwork including the plinth, chamfered reveals, and camber-headed window reveals. All windows to the front elevation had by that date been replaced with appropriate timber sliding sash windows, and a new timber-panelled door with a camber-headed transom light installed.

The principal elevation faces east onto McMaster Street and is symmetrically arranged, with a central entrance door accessed via a tiled threshold, flanked by a single window opening on each side at ground floor (now blocked) and a window at first floor above each. The north gable abuts number 31 and the south gable abuts number 35. To the rear, the house is enclosed by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling, with access to the enclosed yard from a narrow north–south entry running between the back yards of McMaster Street and Parker Street, via a painted, vertically-sheeted timber entrance door.

The house sits directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs. The street itself, formerly cobbled, is now largely concrete with small cobbled areas at each end. Original lamp posts and electric lighting (formerly gas) remain in place, and original tiled street signage is present at the north and south ends of the street.

Number 33 is one of 37 parlour houses forming the complete terrace of McMaster Street, built in several phases between 1899 and 1908. The two-and-a-half-storey houses at the north end were in place by 1899–1900, and by the census of March 1901 numbers 1 to 35 were complete. The southern two-storey houses, including numbers 13 to 37, were valued at £8 each. The houses were built to a notably high specification for working-class housing of the period, with running water and flush toilets, and were subject to building controls requiring a rear entrance, a back yard, and a toilet. Gas was piped in for lighting; electricity did not become commonplace until the 1930s.

The terrace was built to serve the workforce of the rapidly expanding industrial district of Ballymacarrett. Harland and Wolff's shipyard on Queen's Island was employing 9,000 men by 1900, and the wider area supported ropeworks, linen manufacture, engineering, and fertiliser industries. What had been a mid-19th century landscape of fields, cottages, and mansions around an industrial core had by the turn of the century been given over almost entirely to terraced workers' housing.

The first recorded occupant of number 33 was William Orr, who leased it from the developer John McMaster; the 1900 valuation described the house as four years old. The house contained three bedrooms, was fitted with gas, and was let at a weekly rent of five shillings, with a construction cost estimated at £76. William Gamble Orr is recorded in the 1901 census as a riveter, living in the house with his wife and two-year-old daughter. Subsequent tenants recorded in street directories and census records include Samuel Smyth, "holder-up" (1907) — a holder-up being the member of a riveting gang who held the red-hot rivet in place with a pneumatic tool called a dolly while it was hammered flat on the other side of the steel plate — followed by William Nelson, coppersmith (1909); J. Farrell, labourer (1910); Andrew Cochrane, engine fitter, and his wife (recorded in the 1911 census); H. Powell, electrician (1913); A. W. Hildrew, joiner (1914); Geo. Graham, craneman (1919); Robert Tumilson, holder-up (1927); and John McMaster, redleader (1941) — a redleader being a worker who painted red lead oxide onto metal surfaces to prevent rusting.

The McMaster family was forced to vacate the house during the Belfast Blitz. Four air raids struck Belfast during April and May 1941, damaging over half the city's housing stock. McMaster Street was targeted in raids on the nights of 7–8 April and 4–5 May 1941, and the 1942 street directory records most houses in the street as vacated, including number 33, probably as a result of fire damage. By 1943 the majority of residents, including the McMasters, had returned, and the family remained in residence until at least 1980.

The street survived both the Blitz and the widespread demolition of the 1970s redevelopment that removed many of the other terraces in the area. McMaster Street is the only late Victorian terrace in Belfast to have survived in reasonably original condition. The entire terrace was listed in 1987 and the area was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment in 1994. Two houses in the street have been restored by Hearth. Number 33 carries group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street and is currently recorded as derelict, in the ownership of a housing association.