5 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

5 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house, built between 1860 and 1879, that retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting within a conservation area.

The house is one of a terrace of six two-storey dwellings with dormered roofs, numbered 5 to 15. The terrace faces onto a semi-communal garden, and the principal pedestrian access for all houses is by way of a shared path running parallel to the front of the terrace — for some houses, including No. 5, this is the only means of reaching the front door. Some houses also have access to the rear via an entry on the north side of Eglantine Avenue. The large, uninterrupted expanse of green space — free from driveways or individual paths — gives the setting a unique character.

The front elevation is built in fair-faced brick laid in Flemish bond, using a red brick with colour variations that produce an attractive brindled appearance. No. 5 has quoins that match those of the central house of the terrace (No. 11), contributing to a slightly skewed but unified composition across the terrace front.

The front entrance has a stucco surround with narrow pilasters on each side of the door, which rise to large console brackets supporting a moulded projecting cornice. An undecorated frieze links the brackets beneath the cornice and forms the entrance lintel. Above the cornice, a flat plaster pediment — somewhat unusual in character — completes the entrance surround. The front door is a painted timber design of one glazed panel over two over two solid panels, with bolection mouldings. The lower four panels are solid and the upper panel, which is glazed, runs the full width of the door; all panels are the same height. 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 and is glazed as a sliding sash, horizontally divided into two over two panes. The first floor window openings are plain, with painted reveals and brick flat-arched heads, and are similarly fitted with timber sliding sash windows divided into two over two panes. At eaves level, a flat plain painted frieze four courses deep is surmounted by a square-section projecting cornice carrying an ogee cast iron gutter. The cornice is decorated with four pairs of simple rectangular modillions.

There are no dormers to No. 5, although two Velux-type windows have been installed. The gable wall has two small sliding sash windows that provide light to the attic floor. The chimney is plain plastered with a simple square moulding and is fitted with decorated yellow clay pots. The gable elevation has been rendered, as has the yard wall with which it is contiguous; that yard wall has a curved clay tile coping. The rear elevation has a painted brick finish throughout. The principal rear elevation retains its sliding sash windows with horizontally divided two over two glazing. The return or kitchen extension at ground floor level has replacement opening sash windows, a new timber glazed door, and a new large window opening at ground floor level.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

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 curving 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, cutting 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, and with the unity of the Malone farms thereby broken, the area became open to developers.

The first wave of development was relatively modest and decidedly gentrified, taking the form 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 (near 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), 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 housing expansion which, over the course of the following forty years or so, gave rise to the suburbs of the University and Malone area as they exist today.

Research by Stephen Carleton has established that Nos. 1 and 3 of what was to become Wellington Park Terrace were built in 1854, and are recorded in the valuation of 1858 as occupied by Frances Ogilby (No. 1) and William Ferguson (No. 3), both properties leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22. Annotations in the same valuation book show that Nos. 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, 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 occupant of the newly-built No. 9, while No. 11 was first occupied by a Henrietta Walsh, No. 13 by James S. Sheerer, and No. 15 by an Andrew Munce, all dwellings being valued at £13. No. 15, at the then western 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 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 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 of the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events in the years immediately following 1860 is complex, with the valuations full of undated, overlapping notes and the accompanying maps not fully annotated. It is clear, however, that Nos. 5 to 7 were the next to be built, again by John Lowry, with a Thomas Frazer responsible for the development of Nos. 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, 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 by that point.

Some time after the building of Nos. 17 to 21, No. 15 was extended to join with No. 17, creating an unbroken terrace from No. 3 to No. 21. It would seem logical that this work was carried out at or shortly after around 1869, when No. 17 itself was built. The valuations, however, make no mention of any extension prior to at least 1883, and a gap is shown in the terrace on Marcus Ward and Co.'s maps of Belfast for 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of these maps is questionable — they do not, for instance, show Nos. 5 to 7 either — but it remains odd that the valuations record no alterations to the property. The detailing to the door screen appears to be post-1880, though this could of course have been changed at a later date.

It has been suggested that the terrace was originally intended to form the first part of a square; however, as the historical record demonstrates, the development was piecemeal, undertaken by different individuals, with no evidence of any grander scheme behind it. On the contrary, the large garden to the immediate south belonging to Eglantine Hill, which remained largely untouched until the later 1880s, would have prevented any such grand plan. The fact that the houses ultimately ended up sandwiched between two larger terraces is a consequence of the eventual complete sale of the Eglantine Hill grounds, the developers of which found it more convenient to create a new broad thoroughfare to the south — the present Eglantine Avenue.