36 Clarendon Street, Londonderry, County Londonderry, BT48 7ET

No. 36 Clarendon Street is a mid-terrace, two-bay, three-storey red brick Georgian-style townhouse with an attic over a basement, built in 1862 as part of the mid-Victorian development of the north side of Clarendon Street in the city of Derry. It shares group value with Nos. 6–34 and 38–48 Clarendon Street, a row of eleven similar early to mid-Victorian townhouses built over an eight-year period. The building is located within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, and its well-preserved setting and the survival of its original character and much of its original detailing add considerably to its interest.

Architectural Description

The building is rectangular on plan with a projecting return to the rear. The principal elevation faces south, set behind a low replacement rendered plinth wall with a cement-rendered capping. The roof is pitched and covered in natural slate with black clay ridge tiles to both the main roof and the return. A slender rebuilt red brick chimney stack rises from the east side, centred on the ridge and fitted with clay pots. Cast iron half-round guttering on rise-and-fall brackets and a circular downpipe serve the front elevation.

The principal south-facing front elevation is built in Flemish bond brickwork. All window openings are square-headed and glazed with 2/2 timber sliding sashes, set within painted cement-rendered reveals with painted sills, unless otherwise noted. The entrance doorway has a three-centred arched opening with a moulded architrave and entablature supported by a pair of columns of the Doric order, an Adam-style fanlight above, and a four-panelled timber door. To the right of the door is a single window, with a casement window (with unrendered reveals) directly below at basement level. Two further windows appear at first and second floor levels; these upper-floor openings are not aligned with the ground-floor openings and have modern steel guarding. The west and east sides are abutted by the adjoining properties, Nos. 34 and 38 Clarendon Street respectively.

The north-facing rear elevation is rendered and rises three storeys over a basement, with an attic dormer to the left and a three-storey-over-basement return to the right, built at half-landing height. The fenestration to the rear is irregular, incorporating both sliding sashes and casement windows. A timber sheeted door to the rear yard is situated on the east elevation of the return. The rear elevation was not fully visible at the time of survey.

Setting and Materials

The building forms part of a row of eleven similar Georgian-style, early to mid-Victorian townhouses lining the north side of Clarendon Street. The front of the property faces directly onto Clarendon Street, separated from the pavement by the low replacement rendered plinth wall. To the north end of the site is a two-storey mews building, with a laneway running along its rear providing access to the rest of the terrace. The roof is clad in natural slate; rainwater goods are cast iron; the main walls are brick; and the windows are timber sliding sashes and casements.

Historical Context

Clarendon Street was laid out in the early Victorian period as part of the most ambitious programme of town planning in Londonderry since the construction of the walled city between 1613 and 1619. Its geometric street pattern followed the same principles as the nearby Georgian developments of Great James Street and Queen Street, and reflected a significant period of growth in the economy and population of the city during the mid-19th century.

The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map of 1830 for the townland of Edenballymore records that the Clarendon Street area was originally rural hinterland with few significant structures. In 1830 the city's streets extended no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street and William Street. In the early decades of the 19th century the only major construction north of the walls had been isolated institutional buildings such as the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum and Foyle College, with little or no domestic architecture erected in the same period. The sole building in the area predating the early Victorian development is Foyle Cottage, a Regency house constructed around 1815. Writing in 1847, Robert Simpson recorded in The Annals of Derry that the district covered by Great James Street, William Street, Little James Street and the surrounding lanes had originally comprised meadow ground without a house.

The street was originally known as Ponsonby Street, named after the Right Reverend Richard Ponsonby (1772–1853), Bishop of Derry and Raphoe. By the 1850s it had been renamed Clarendon Street in honour of the Fourth Earl of Clarendon, George Villiers (1800–1870), Lord Lieutenant of Ireland between 1847 and 1852. The second edition of the Ordnance Survey map confirms that the renaming had taken place by at least 1853. Although a plan of Londonderry dated 1847 shows Clarendon Street extending from the quay up to Francis Street, only the lower section between the Strand Road and Queen Street had been laid out by 1853. Development progressed slowly through the 1850s; Griffith's Valuation recorded only nine dwellings along the entire length of the street by 1856, and in that year additional leases were advertised for building ground on the northern side.

No. 36 was constructed as part of the second phase of development. Together with the adjoining Nos. 28–34 Clarendon Street, it was built in 1862 for John Allen, a wine merchant and property owner who held business premises on Linenhall Street. The three-storey house was originally valued at £27 and was first occupied by a Captain Morton in 1862. By 1901 it was occupied by David B. Cunningham, managing clerk at a local solicitors firm; the census of that year described the house as a first-class dwelling consisting of ten rooms. Ownership remained with the Allen family until the 1930s, when a Ms Selina Gosselin purchased the building along with a number of other properties on both sides of Clarendon Street. By 1956 the owner was recorded as the Reverend Neil Farren, Roman Catholic Bishop of Derry between 1939 and 1973. The building continued in use as a private dwelling, valued at £36 by the end of the Second Revaluation of 1956–72.

In 1978 the Department of the Environment designated Clarendon Street and the surrounding streets a Conservation Area, defined as an area of special architectural or historic interest, the character of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance. No. 36 was subsequently listed in 1979. In 1991 Nos. 36–38 were converted into a number of self-contained flats; the conversion of No. 36 included the replacement of the building's glazing and the installation of a steel fire escape to the rear. At the time of the second survey the building continued to be used as residential flats.

Writing in 2013, Calley described Nos. 6–48 Clarendon Street as a "delightfully long red brick terrace of the mid-19th century," noting that "the buildings are nearly all the same, being three-and-a-half-storey, two-bay with most ground floors rather inelegantly squeezing in a doorway with two reduced scale window bays," and that "depressed arched recessed timber-framed doorways have simple segmented fanlights and thin Doric columns supporting entablatures." Throughout their history the occupants of Clarendon Street were drawn from the city's merchant and professional classes. Few of the mid-Victorian townhouses along the street are now occupied as residential dwellings, with the majority having been converted into offices for dentists, solicitors and accountancy firms in the late 20th century.