11 Wellington Park Terrace, Belfast

Number 11 Wellington Park Terrace is an attractive mid-Victorian terraced house, built between 1858 and 1860, that retains most of its original features and forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting within a conservation area.

THE TERRACE AND ITS SETTING

Number 11 is the central house in a terrace of six mid-Victorian two-storey dwellings with dormered roofs, numbered 5 to 15. The terrace looks out onto semi-communal gardens. Some houses have access via an entry at the rear of the north side of Eglantine Avenue, but for all houses the principal pedestrian access is by way of a shared path running parallel to the front of the terrace — for some houses, this is the only way to reach the front door. The large semi-communal green space, uninterrupted by driveways or paths, gives a unique character to the setting. As the central house in the composition, number 11 has quoins at its corners (as do the end houses, though the quoins on number 15 have been lost), forming a slightly skewed but unified composition across the terrace front.

EXTERIOR

The principal front elevation is built in fair-faced brick laid in Flemish bond, using a red brick with colour variations that give an attractive brindled appearance.

The front entrance is framed by a stucco surround with narrow pilasters on each side of the door, rising to large console brackets that support a moulded projecting cornice. An undecorated frieze links the brackets beneath the cornice and also serves as the entrance lintel. Above the cornice, a curious flat plaster pediment completes the entrance surround. The front door itself is a four-panel painted timber design with bolection mouldings. The lower two panels are solid; the upper two are glazed with square heads and contain replacement glass. 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. The window is a sliding sash, horizontally divided into two over two panes, with vertical margin panes. The first floor window openings are plainer, with painted reveals and brick flat-arched heads, also fitted with timber sliding sash windows of the same two-over-two with vertical margin pane arrangement. A considerable amount of original crown glass survives throughout the house.

At eaves level, a flat plain painted frieze four brick courses deep is surmounted by a square-section projecting cornice that carries an ogee-profile cast iron gutter. The cornice is decorated with four pairs of simple rectangular modillions.

The roof has a dormer with a three-pilastered front framing two small sliding sash windows with shallow arched heads beneath a simple cornice. The bargeboards are scalloped and surmounted by a finial, and the cheeks of the dormer are tile-hung. The chimneys are plain plastered with a simple square moulded cornice and are fitted with ornamental yellow clay round pots.

Number 11 differs from its neighbours of the same date in retaining an original three-storey rear return. The rear elevation has been rendered. The ground floor principal rear wall retains large sliding sash windows with six-over-six glazing. The return and kitchen area at ground floor level has replacement opening sash windows, while the remainder of the rear elevation retains original two-over-two horizontally divided sliding sash windows.

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 turning south-west towards Lisburn. Long, narrow strip farms stretched westward 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 worked by under-tenants, whose largely humble farmhouses were scattered along the road. 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 perpetual leases on land to the south of Belfast, and with the unity of the Malone farms thus broken, the area became open to developers.

The first wave of development was relatively modest and decidedly genteel, consisting of small country villas surrounded by spacious gardens, many occupying the former farm strips between the Malone Road and the new Lisburn Road. Travelling southward, these included Fountainville Cottage (close to 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), 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 beginnings of Belfast's rising merchant classes moving 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 expansion, which over the following forty years or so led to the establishment of the suburbs of the University and Malone area as they exist today.

Research by Stephen Carleton has shown 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 (number 1) and William Ferguson (number 3), both properties leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22. Annotations within 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 of the 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 Andrew Munce, with all dwellings 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 — noted 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 turnover of tenants across all the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events in the years immediately after 1860 is complicated, with the valuations containing undated 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. The precise dating 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 all were present by that point.

Some time after the building of numbers 17 to 21, number 15 was extended to join with number 17, creating an unbroken terrace from number 3 to number 21. This work was presumably carried out in or shortly after around 1869, when number 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 Company's maps of Belfast for 1884 and 1888. The accuracy of these maps is questionable — they do not show numbers 5 to 7 either — but it is notable that the valuations record no alterations to the property. The detailing to the door screen appears to post-date 1880, though it could of course have been changed at a later date.

It has been suggested that the terrace was built as the first part of what was intended to be a square; however, the evidence shows the development was piecemeal, undertaken by different individuals with no evidence of any grander scheme. The large garden immediately to the south belonging to Eglantine Hill, which remained largely untouched until the later 1880s, would in any case have prevented such a scheme. The fact that the houses ultimately ended up sandwiched between two larger terraces is a consequence of the developers of the Eglantine Hill grounds finding it more convenient, when those grounds were eventually sold off, to create a new broad thoroughfare to the south — the present Eglantine Avenue.