67 University Road, Belfast, Co Antrim, BT7 1NF

67 University Road is a plain, two-storey late Georgian and early Victorian style terraced house built in 1852, with a brick façade, forming part of a group of three broadly similar properties. The building is now divided into flats and offices.

The terrace to which it belongs was originally named Botanic View and sits on the west side of University Road, with Camden Street to the north and Fitzwilliam Street to the south. The terrace as a whole comprises this property and its two similar neighbours, three three-storey late Georgian style stucco houses of around 1840 to 1841 to the north, and four similar but taller three-storey late Georgian stuccoed houses further north again, all now converted to flats. No. 67 occupies the southern end of the terrace.

The front, east-facing façade is asymmetrical. To the left on the ground floor is the original entrance doorway, which is no longer used as the flats are now accessed from a rear stairwell return. The doorway consists of a traditional-style panelled and glazed door, which in practice functions as a window. It has plain timber pilaster jambs and a plain elliptical fanlight, with the whole ensemble set within an elliptical-headed recess with a rendered reveal. To the right of this doorway are two flat-arched windows with plain sash frames. At first-floor level, set somewhat wider apart than the ground-floor windows, are two further windows with Georgian-paned sash frames, each with a six-over-six pane arrangement. Brick string courses run at first-floor cill level and again above the first-floor windows.

To the rear, the ground floor has two sash windows with Georgian panes in a six-over-three arrangement, and the first floor has two similar windows. The rear façade is finished in plain render and painted. The main roof is gabled and slated. To the rear there is a large flat-roofed dormer, presumably added around 1984, fitted with a Georgian-paned casement window. There is also a small Velux window to the front slope. A tall rendered chimneystack to the north has a string course and decorative matching pots; a brick chimneystack sits to the south. Verge courses are present to both front and rear, both with what appears to be recent moulded guttering, and modern square downspouts. To the front, a small garden is enclosed by low rendered walls and filled with shrubbery.

University Road was originally the main route south from Belfast to Dublin, running along the Malone Ridge. Long, narrow strip farms stretched westward from it across what is now South Belfast. By the mid-18th century many of these farms had been leased by the Donegall estate to Belfast merchants. The laying out of the present Lisburn Road in 1819 and the cutting of the Ulster Railway through the lower fields by 1839 fragmented the farming landscape. From 1823 onwards the Donegall estate began granting perpetual leases on land south of Belfast, opening the area to development.

John Alexander was one developer who took advantage of this. His family had held a lease on 31 acres in the townland of Lower Malone since the early 18th century and in 1823 acquired it outright from Lord Donegall for £480. Alexander built the three-storey portions of the Botanic View terrace, the present nos. 53 to 65 University Road, between 1840 and 1843, while parcelling out adjacent land to other developers. This led to the construction of Fitzwilliam Place (nos. 71 to 75) in 1846 to 1848, dwellings along the newly laid-out Fitzwilliam Street (nos. 2 to 8) around 1849 to 1850, Camden Terrace along the newly laid-out Camden Street in 1849 to 1852, and the two-storey southern portion of Botanic View, including no. 67, by 1852. These new dwellings, together with others nearby such as Fountainville Terrace, Upper and Lower Crescent, Prospect and Claremont Terraces, and University Square to the east, marked the beginning of the suburbanisation of South Belfast and the movement of the town's professional and commercial classes away from its centre. The earliest inhabitants of Botanic View reflected this social profile, with directories from the late 1840s and early 1850s recording a surgeon, an engineer, a drawing master, and various businessmen among the residents.

The whole of Botanic View remained in Alexander family ownership until 1881, when nos. 53 to 65 were sold to Robert Kelso Mathewson. In 1950 the properties passed to Queen's University, with no. 67 specifically acquired by Queen's in 1963. In 1982 the University sold the entire group to the Malone Housing Association. Up to that point the properties had largely remained in use as private dwellings, some occupied latterly by University staff and students, though no. 55 served as a temporary post office in 1971 to 1972, nos. 57 to 59 housed a branch of the Ulster Bank in the same period, and no. 59 was demolished in 1979 after sustaining damage in a bomb blast. In the mid-1980s, Malone Housing Association converted the whole group into flats. No. 59 was rebuilt in this process, with nos. 53, 55, and 57 providing three flats each and six flats shared between nos. 61, 63, 65, and 67. All original rear returns were demolished to make way for new stairwell projections, with a single stairwell shared between each former house. In March 2000 the entire group was reconveyed to Queen's University. The property sits within a conservation area.