2 West End Park, Londonderry

2 West End Park is a late-Victorian mid-terrace townhouse built in 1896, likely to designs by Joseph Ballantine, a local architect and builder who originally owned numbers 1 to 7 West End Park. It is a fine example of Tudor-influenced Arts and Crafts style applied to urban terrace housing, and forms part of a row of twenty-two houses lining the west side of West End Park, a north-south street on the west bank of the River Foyle at the southern end of Lone Moor Road. The building is currently in use as an office but was originally built as a dwelling. It sits in the townland of Edenballymore.

The house is three storeys tall, two bays wide, and rectangular on plan with a large projecting rear return. It is set behind a low rendered and painted boundary wall on an elevated site, with the front entrance reached by a flight of five steps.

The principal east-facing elevation is built in red brick laid in English Garden Wall Bond. Its most prominent feature is a two-storey canted bay window rising from ground to first floor level, above which sits a slightly cantilevered box window with a pediment at second floor level. This upper window rests on the canted bay and is supported by large timber brackets to either side. The pediment is given a half-timber treatment with a plain wide painted timber fascia board, and contains a coupled 6/2 timber sliding sash window. The second floor level more broadly carries half-timber decorative treatment, supported on small carved timber corbel brackets. Painted rendered bands mark the ground and first floor window heads, with a painted rendered surround to the canted bay windows and a painted sill course to the first floor windows.

All windows on the front elevation are timber sliding sashes: 1/2 sliding sashes to the canted bay at ground and first floor, the same type to the first floor window above the main entrance door, and a 4/4 horizontally hung timber sliding sash at second floor level. The entrance doorway has a square-headed opening and retains an original pair of full-height raised-and-fielded half-leaf painted timber doors — a particularly important surviving historic detail.

The pitched roof is covered in natural slate, continuous with that of number 3 next door, and features modern roof lights. It is finished with black clay ridge tiles to both the main roof and rear return. A large rendered chimney stack with eleven terracotta clay pots is shared with number 1, rising from the north side and centred on the ridge. A second, smaller rendered chimney stack rises from the gable end of the rear return below ridge level. The timber fascia and soffit have exposed rafter tails, and rainwater goods throughout are half-round uPVC guttering discharging to circular uPVC downpipes.

The north and south sides of the house are joined to the neighbouring properties at numbers 1 and 3 West End Park. The rear west elevation is smooth-rendered and painted, three storeys tall, with a half gable shared with number 3. A three-storey rear return steps down to a single-storey lean-to extension with a modern roof light and a natural slate roof. The fenestration at the rear is irregular, with 1/2 timber sliding sash windows to the first and second floors of the rear elevation, and a mix of timber sliding sashes and casement windows to the rear return. A rendered and painted high boundary wall with a coping stone and a vertically sheeted timber door gives access to a rear passageway leading to Eastway Gardens.

Numbers 1 to 7 West End Park form a cohesive group of seven houses that are distinctly more detailed in character than numbers 8 to 22, which were built in a plainer Victorian style up until 1905. Number 2 retains much of its original external historic fabric and detailing, and together with its immediate neighbours contributes significantly to the character and appearance of the local area.