17 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

17 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house, built most likely around 1869, that retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting in the Malone area of south Belfast.

SETTING AND CONTEXT

The house forms part of a sub-terrace of three dwellings — numbers 17 to 21 — which make up the western end of a longer terrace of nine houses (numbers 5 to 21). A further two houses, numbers 1 and 3, are also part of the terrace but are separated from the others by a laneway. Numbers 17 to 21 share a pedestrian access off the main Wellington Park Terrace road. The terrace looks out onto individual gardens, and the large, semi-communal green space at the front, uninterrupted by driveways or paths, gives the setting a unique character.

EXTERIOR — FRONT ELEVATION

The principal front elevation is of fair-faced brick construction laid in Flemish bond, using a red brick with colour variations that give an attractive brindled appearance. The composition is deliberately asymmetric, with the two first-floor windows out of alignment with the ground-floor entrance door and window.

Door and window heads are finished with flat but segmental brick-and-a-half arches using squint headers to form an eyebrow course above. The door arch has a stucco keystone, and squint stretchers form the central part of the soffit of each arch. At first-floor cill level there is a stucco string course, beneath which runs a string course of headers alternating with squint headers. At eaves level, four courses of cream-coloured Flemish bond brick are carried on a corbel formed from a course of headers alternating with squint headers.

All three windows are two-over-two, vertically divided, sliding sash windows in white-painted timber with minimal exposure of the frames. The front door is a late 20th-century design in timber, painted blue, with small panes to the top half and panels below, and is accompanied by a rectangular fanlight.

ROOF

The roof has a large, felted flat-roofed dormer of timber construction with picture-frame windows and rectangular glazing to the cheeks. The main roof slopes are covered in natural slate, presumed to be Welsh. The chimneys are in facing brick similar to that used on the front elevation, built in two stages with the top four courses forming a corbel. The chimneys retain their round clay pots, most of which appear to be original.

EXTERIOR — REAR ELEVATION

The rear elevation is finished in cement roughcast. There is a sliding sash window, as on the front, at first-floor level. At roof level to the rear there is a small flat-roofed dormer with slate-hung cheeks and a front face comprising a pair of side-hung casements.

There is a three-storey back return with a pitched slated roof. The top storey is in red facing clay brick and the lower storey in painted cement render; the top brick storey has probably been added in recent decades. The gable of this brick storey has two window openings with concrete cills and exposed concrete lintels, and the windows are two-over-two, horizontally divided sliding sashes in painted timber with partial exposure of the frames.

At first-floor level, the return has two original window openings facing into the small enclosed yard of number 19, also with two-over-two, horizontally divided sliding sashes in painted timber with partial exposure of the frames. On the south side of the return, a similar window faces into the yard of number 17. The rear yard is enclosed by a rendered wall with a security railing above.

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 heading south-west towards Lisburn. Stretching westwards from this road and sloping down towards 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 worked 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 driven 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 distinctly genteel, consisting of small country villas set within spacious gardens, many of them occupying the former farm strips between the Malone and the new Lisburn Road. 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 (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 beginning of a 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 following forty years or so led to the creation of the University and Malone suburban area seen today.

Research by Stephen Carleton has established that numbers 1 and 3 of what was to become Wellington Park Terrace were built in 1854, recorded in the valuation of 1858 as occupied by a Frances Ogilby at number 1 and William Ferguson at number 3, both properties leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22. Annotations in 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, who in 1858 held the lease on that plot 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 properties valued at £13. Number 15, at the then western end of the block, appears originally to have been entered via a porch to the gable.

In 1862, Lowry subdivided the land to the rear of these houses, which had been described 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 occupants of numbers 13 and 15 respectively. In the early years, the rate of tenant turnover across all the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events immediately after 1860 is somewhat unclear, 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, which includes the present house. The precise date is uncertain, but analysis of handwriting styles and ink colours used by various valuers suggests 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 numbers 17 to 21, number 15 was extended to join number 17, creating an unbroken terrace from number 3 to 21. This work was presumably carried out in or shortly after around 1869 when number 17 itself was built. However, the valuations make no mention of any 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 those maps is questionable — they do not show numbers 5 to 7 either — but the absence of any record in the valuations is notable. The detailing of the door screen appears post-1880, though this could have been changed at a later date.

It has been suggested that the terrace was intended as the first part of a planned square, but the development was clearly piecemeal and carried out by different individuals, with no evidence of any grander underlying scheme. The large garden immediately to the south belonging to Eglantine Hill, which remained largely undeveloped until the later 1880s, would in any case have made such a plan impractical. The fact that the houses ultimately ended up sandwiched between two larger terraces reflects the circumstances of the Eglantine Hill grounds being finally sold off, at which point the developers of that site found it more convenient to create a new broad thoroughfare — the present Eglantine Avenue — to the south.