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

No. 44 McMaster Street is a two-storey, single-bay terraced house built around 1898 on the east side of McMaster Street, East Belfast, in the Ballymacarrett area. It was constructed by the landowner John McMaster to designs by J. Frazer and Son, a practice active from the 1890s into the early 20th century that also designed similar terraced streets elsewhere in Belfast, including Chadwick Street and Meadowbank Place.

ARCHITECTURE

The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles and a red brick chimney stack at the south side. Rainwater goods are painted ogee-profile cast iron, supported on a projecting polychromatic brick eaves course over an ovolo-moulded corbel course. The walls are English garden-wall bonded red brick, laid with alternating courses of headers and stretchers, with two polychromatic brick string courses, one of which forms a continuous brick and sill course at first-floor level.

All window openings and the door opening have camber-headed reveals with polychromatic brick chamfered reveals and voussoirs, and projecting masonry sills. The windows are replacement horizontally-divided PVC casements (the listing record also notes replacement 1-over-1 timber sliding sashes, indicating some variation across the building), and the door is a replacement uPVC unit with a square-headed transom light.

The principal west-facing elevation has the entrance door at the left, accessed via a concrete threshold, with a window immediately to its right. Two windows sit at first-floor level, offset slightly to the right. The north gable abuts No. 42 McMaster Street, and the south gable abuts No. 46. At the rear, the ground floor is partially abutted on the right by a two-storey flat-roof extension, and access to the enclosed yard is provided from a rear entry through a timber-sheeted door set in high-level brick walling on all sides.

SETTING

No. 44 sits in the middle of the east terrace block and faces directly onto McMaster Street. The formerly cobbled street is now largely concrete surfaced, with small cobbled areas at each end. The house opens onto a wide pavement with granite kerbs, original lamp posts, and electric lighting (converted from former gas lights). Original tiled street signage survives at the north and south ends of the street. The rear elevation is enclosed by high-level stretcher-bonded modern red brick walling with a painted vertically-sheeted timber entrance door at the centre, accessed via a narrow entry running north to south between the back yards of Lendrick Street and McMaster Street. The street narrows towards Major Street at the south. No. 44 has group value with the other listed buildings on McMaster Street.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

No. 44 first appears on the fourth edition Ordnance Survey map of 1920–21, by which time both terraces of McMaster Street had been completed. Records show that the western terrace (Nos. 1–37) and Nos. 6–14 on the eastern side were built in 1898–99, while the remainder of the eastern terrace, including No. 44, was not completed until 1908 — a decade after the street's first phase of construction began.

The land on which the street stands was originally owned by John McMaster, who held the freehold of the south side of the Newtownards Road. Because the plot was wedge-shaped, the terraces became progressively narrower and their gardens smaller toward the street's southern end; No. 44 therefore has a noticeably smaller yard than the houses at the top of the terrace.

The first recorded occupant was Robert Heaney, who moved in when the eastern terrace was completed in 1908. The house was then valued at £8. By 1911 a Robert Drysdale, employed as a riveter at the nearby shipyards, was living there; the Census Building Return of that year classified the house as a second-class dwelling consisting of seven rooms. Drysdale had vacated by 1918, when Thomas Hobson, a moulder at the yards, was recorded as occupant. The value of No. 44 remained at £8 through to 1930, rising to £11 by the First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland in 1935. By 1940 a brassfitter named Robert Miller occupied the house; he died in 1944, leaving his widow Ellen Miller as occupant. Mrs. Miller continued to live at No. 44 until the 1970s, when a Mr. S. Donnelly came into possession.

The Second World War revaluation noted that ownership of the street had passed from John McMaster to an L. McMaster (relationship unknown). The value of No. 44 was increased to £12 and remained there until the close of the revaluation period in 1972.

McMaster Street escaped damage during the 1941 Belfast Blitz, when the Luftwaffe raided the nearby Harland and Wolff shipyards and caused widespread destruction to buildings and residential terraces along the Newtownards Road. The street's proximity to those shipyards and to the ropework factories that were the area's principal employers gives it a strong connection to Belfast's industrial past; many occupants of No. 44 and its neighbours were recorded as employed in those industries.

The parlour houses of McMaster Street were built under new housing and planning regulations specifically designed to improve living standards for working-class people in Belfast. The terrace was among the first late-Victorian industrial housing in the city to be supplied with running water and flushable toilets, made possible by a new city drainage system, and gas was piped into each house for lighting — both significant improvements over the conditions common in earlier Victorian Belfast. Electricity was not introduced to the street until the 1930s.

During the 1970s the Ballymacarrett area underwent extensive redevelopment, during which many red-brick terraces similar to McMaster Street were demolished. McMaster Street survived as an intact remnant of late-Victorian working-class housing. No. 44 was listed in 1987 along with the rest of the terrace, and in 1994 the neighbourhood 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 street.