11 Fountain Street, Londonderry, Co. Londonderry, BT48 6QX

11 Fountain Street is a modest mid-terrace two-storey, two-bay Victorian townhouse, built in 1883 as part of a uniform stepped terrace of fourteen similar houses lining the north-west side of Fountain Street, Londonderry. It sits just outside the historic city walls, between New Gate and Ferry Quay Gate, and to the east of St Columb's Cathedral. The house is recorded but not listed, as insufficient original historic fabric survives to meet the listing criteria, though it contributes to the group value of Nos. 9–35 Fountain Street and falls within the Historic City Conservation Area.

The building is rectangular on plan with a projecting single-storey rear return with a flat felted roof, added in the late 20th century. The principal elevation faces south-east onto Fountain Street, set back at the pavement edge beneath a natural slate pitched roof with black ridge tiles. It is built in English Garden Wall brick bond — a polychromatic scheme combining red brick with contrasting black brick dressings in a manner the Conservation Area Design Guide links to the Victorian taste for polychrome brickwork derived from the Venetian Gothic. The eaves feature an ornamental projecting brick cornice with a double band of black brick dressings below. Continuous decorative stringcourses in contrasting black brick run at sill and head level on both the ground and first floors, with a further row of black brick separated by three courses of red above sill level and below head level.

On the south-east elevation there is one segmental arch-headed window opening on the ground floor and two on the first floor, along with a segmental arch-headed entrance door opening level with the pavement. All openings have red brick voussoirs with three black bricks to the centre forming a keystone detail. The entrance door is a non-original painted six-panel timber door with an integral fanlight, and there is a plain segmental-headed fanlight above it. Ground and first floor windows are timber casements with top-hung opening lights. All window sills are replacement concrete with a painted finish. Roof lights are present to the rear north-east (left-hand) side and centrally to the front south-east slope. Black uPVC rainwater goods serve the front elevation; cast aluminium guttering and circular downpipes serve the rear. A large red brick chimney stack rises from the north-east side, centred on the ridge, with six capped clay pots, a contrasting black brick course below a projecting red brick course, and a further black band three courses below that.

The rear north-west elevation is of unpainted rendered finish. The fenestration here is irregular, with timber casement windows including some set at half-landing height on the south-west side of the rear elevation. The north-east and south-west sides of the house are abutted by the adjoining Nos. 9 and 13 Fountain Street respectively (No. 9 has been painted).

Fountain Street is one of the earliest streets to have been developed outside the walled city of Londonderry. According to architectural historian D. Calley, buildings on this site were depicted on maps as early as 1685, and the street may have been settled almost immediately after the walls were built by those willing to live outside their protection — though originally only the side of the street away from the walls was built upon, the wall side being kept clear for defence. The street took the name Fountain Street by the 1830s, in reference to a fountain located next to Church Bastion.

The current terrace replaced an earlier irregular row of buildings on the site. Historical records show that the previous terrace, which occupied the stretch between Ferryquay Street and Hawkin Street, comprised a number of unequal buildings leased by Hamilton Graham, a local bookkeeper who resided on the Northland Road. This earlier row was demolished and replaced with the present uniform terrace in 1883. Hamilton Graham continued to lease the terrace until his death in 1892, and it was occupied by working-class labourers, the majority of whom worked in the neighbouring factories and local industries — many almost certainly employed by the Welch Margetson Shirt Factory on the opposite side of the street.

Following completion, No. 11 was valued at £8. Its first recorded occupant was James McGonigle, a bank messenger whose wife and daughter worked as machinists in a local factory. The 1901 census return described the house as a second-class dwelling consisting of six rooms with a coal house as its sole outbuilding. Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57), its value was raised to £12. At that time the property was occupied by a Mr. Robert Greer, and in 1945 it was purchased by the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy on nearby Pump Street. Under the Second Revaluation (1956–72) the house was occupied by a Mr. A. Shields and valued at £15 and 10 shillings.

In 1970, the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide to Londonderry described Fountain Street in the following terms: "The relatively narrow streets, the two-storey brick houses, the stepped roofs and the small domestic scale of the dwellings and the streets are typical of the environment." During the 1970s, the stretch of Fountain Street running from Hawkin Street to Bishop Street was demolished and the area redeveloped as a modern housing estate. This clearance also obliterated Albert Street and Place, Fountain Place, Victoria Street, Clarence Place, one side of Kennedy Street, and all but a single tower of the City Gaol. Nos. 11–35 Fountain Street survive as one of only a small number of terraces that escaped this wholesale redevelopment, and they stand today as a remnant of the once strong industrial working-class character of the Fountain area, which supplied workers to Londonderry's shirt-making and ship-building industries during the city's prosperous late Victorian period. The terrace was included within the Historic City Conservation Area in 2006.