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

No. 16 McMaster Street is a two-storey-with-attic, single-bay late Victorian terraced house, built around 1896–1898 by landowner John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son, and located on the east side of McMaster Street in the Ballymacarrett area of East Belfast. It is one of the largest houses on the street and is unique as the only house on the eastern terrace built in 1908 to possess a full attic storey.

EXTERIOR

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles, a central rooflight window on the west slope, and a modern red brick chimney stack at the south side. Painted ogee-profile cast-iron rainwater goods are supported on a projecting polychrome brick eaves course over an ovolo-moulded corbel course.

The walls are laid in English garden-wall bond — red brick with alternating courses of headers and stretchers — and feature three polychromatic brick string courses, including a continuous brick and sill course at first-floor level, along with decorative polychromatic brickwork detailing above the first-floor windows. All of the polychrome brickwork has been painted, with the exception of that above the first-floor windows. The window openings and the entrance door opening have camber-headed profiles with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs and projecting masonry sills. The windows themselves are replacement square-headed 1-over-1 timber sliding sashes; the entrance door is a replacement timber panelled glazed door with a camber-headed leaded transom light above it.

The principal (west) elevation faces onto McMaster Street. The entrance door sits to the left and is flanked by a window to the right; it is accessed by an original polychromatic tiled threshold. At first-floor level there are two windows, offset slightly to the right. The north gable wall abuts No. 14 McMaster Street and the south gable abuts No. 18. The rear (east) elevation was not accessible at the time of survey. At the rear, the enclosed yard is bounded by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling on all sides, with a modern single-storey lean-to extension abutting the rear elevation to the right, extending from the north wall of the yard. Access to the yard is from the entry to the east via a timber-sheeted door set within the modern brick walling.

SETTING

The house sits at the north end of the east terrace and opens directly onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs. The street, formerly cobbled, is now largely laid with concrete, retaining small cobbled areas at each end. Original lamp posts and electric lighting (converted from former gas lights) remain in place, as does original tiled street signage at the north and south ends of the street. The rear of the property is reached via a narrow entry running north–south between the back yards of McMaster Street and Lendrick Street. The street narrows towards Major Street at its southern end.

HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE

John McMaster owned a wedge-shaped parcel of land on the south side of the Newtownards Road, and the terraces he developed there became progressively narrower and had smaller gardens as construction proceeded towards the far end of the street. The western terrace (Nos. 1–37) and Nos. 6–14 on the eastern terrace were constructed in 1898–99. The remainder of the eastern terrace, including No. 16, was not built until 1908, a decade after the street's first phase of construction. No. 16 first appears on the fourth edition of the Ordnance Survey map for Belfast, surveyed in 1920–21.

The Belfast revaluation of 1900 recorded that the adjoining No. 14 McMaster Street — identical in design to No. 16 — was a two-storey house with an attic floor measuring 13.6 ft wide by 25 ft deep and 24 ft high, fitted with gas lighting and estimated to have cost £131 to construct. On completion in 1908, No. 16 was valued at £10, higher than the smaller houses also built that year on the same terrace. By the First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland in 1935 its value had risen to £15.

The first recorded occupant of No. 16 was Mr. James Johnston, who rented the house from John McMaster at a monthly rent of £1 8s. 4d. (£17 per annum). The 1911 Census describes the house as a second-class dwelling comprising seven rooms, and records that Johnston worked as a caulker — a shipyard worker who sealed ships to make them watertight — while his sons were employed in the yards as an engineer and a clerk respectively. By 1918, a Mr. James Forrester, also a shipyard engineer, had moved in and remained until the 1940s. Around 1950, a Mr. James Stevenson, likewise employed as a caulker in the shipyards, was recorded as occupant; he continued to live there until his death around 1970, after which his widow Lily was recorded as occupant in the Belfast Street Directories. Ownership of the street had by this time passed from John McMaster to an L. McMaster, an unknown relative.

The architect John Frazer and Sons was active from the 1890s through to the second decade of the 20th century and designed a number of other terraced streets in Belfast including Chadwick Street (built 1899) and Meadowbank Place, both of which are similar in design to McMaster Street.

The parlour houses of McMaster Street were built to new housing and planning regulations specifically intended to improve the standard of living for working-class people in Belfast. The terraces were among the first late Victorian industrial housing in the city to be supplied with running water and flushable toilets, made possible by the construction of a new city drainage system. Gas was also piped into each house from the outset to provide lighting — a new practice at the time — which distinguished McMaster Street from the more squalid early Victorian housing then common in Belfast. Electricity was not introduced to the street until the 1930s.

McMaster Street escaped damage during the Belfast Blitz of 1941, when the Luftwaffe targeted the Belfast shipyards and caused widespread destruction to buildings and residential terraces along the Newtownards Road. During the 1970s the wider Ballymacarrett area was extensively redeveloped and many comparable redbrick terraces were demolished. McMaster Street survived intact, and No. 16 was listed along with the rest of the terrace in 1987. In 1994 the street was designated a conservation area by the Department of the Environment, with criteria established to ensure that any additions remain in keeping with the original design and fabric of the late Victorian street.

No. 16 McMaster Street has group value with the other listed buildings in McMaster Street and is of local historical interest as part of an unbroken late Victorian working-class street with direct connections to Belfast's shipbuilding and ropework industries.