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

14 Clarendon Street is an early Victorian mid-terrace townhouse of two bays and three storeys with an attic, built in red brick in a Georgian style before 1856. It sits on the north side of Clarendon Street within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, and forms part of a continuous row of eleven similar townhouses sharing group value with Nos. 6–12 and 16–48. The building retains much of its original character and detailing.

The plan is rectangular, with a projecting two-storey rear return that steps down to a single-storey extension. The principal elevation faces south onto Clarendon Street, set behind a low rendered wall topped with replacement cast iron railings enclosing a small hard-surfaced forecourt.

The roof is pitched and covered in natural slate, with black clay ridge tiles to both the main roof and the rear return, and a single rooflight to the front slope. A slender red brick chimney stack rises from the east side, centred on the ridge and fitted with clay pots. Cast iron half-round guttering and rainwater pipes run along the front elevation.

The south-facing principal elevation is laid in Flemish bond brickwork. Window openings have cut brick flat arches, with 6/6 timber sliding sash windows set within painted cement-rendered reveals and painted sills. The entrance doorway, positioned to the left, has a three-centred arched opening with a moulded surround and a moulded entablature supported by a pair of Doric columns, above which sits a simple radial fanlight. The door itself is four-panelled timber. To the right of the door at ground floor level are two diminished windows, with two further windows at first and second floor levels — notably, the upper-floor openings are not aligned with those below.

The east and west elevations are abutted by the adjoining Nos. 12 and 16 Clarendon Street respectively. The rear elevation is three storeys tall, with an attic dormer to the left and the pitched-roof two-storey rear return to the right, which steps down to a single-storey flat-roofed extension. This extension connects to a two-storey pitched-roofed building at the rear of the site, with a small yard beyond. Windows to the exposed section of the main rear elevation are square-headed 6/6 sliding sash windows at all floor levels, with a single 6/3 timber sliding sash dormer window.

The majority of the rear yard has been developed, leaving only a small yard to the far north with a laneway beyond providing access to the rest of the terrace.

Historical background

Clarendon Street was laid out in the early Victorian period as part of the most ambitious town planning exercise in Londonderry since the construction of the walled city between 1613 and 1619. The street followed the geometric pattern characteristic of Georgian urban development, alongside Great James Street and Queen Street, and was driven by significant growth in the city's economy and population in the mid-19th century. As recorded in Robert Simpson's Annals of Derry (1847), the entire district had originally been meadow ground without a house, a fact confirmed by the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1830, which shows the Clarendon Street area — lying within the townland of Edenballymore — as largely rural hinterland. By 1830, built development in Derry had extended no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street and William Street. The only significant buildings north of the walls in the early 19th century were isolated institutions such as the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum and Foyle College, with little domestic architecture in the vicinity. The one exception was Foyle Cottage, a Regency house of around 1815 that predates the Victorian terrace development entirely.

The street was originally named Ponsonby Street, after the Rt. Rev. Richard Ponsonby (1772–1853), Bishop of Derry and Raphoe, but had been renamed Clarendon Street by at least 1853 — as recorded on the second edition Ordnance Survey map — in honour of George Villiers, the Fourth Earl of Clarendon (1800–1870), who served as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland between 1847 and 1852. A plan of Londonderry drawn in 1847 had already depicted the intended layout of the street under its new name, at least a decade before construction was complete. Although the plan showed 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. Progress was slow throughout the 1850s: in 1851, building ground on Clarendon Street, Queen Street and Patrick Street was advertised to let in perpetuity by Skipton and Miller, and Griffith's Valuation of 1856 recorded only nine dwellings along the entire length of the street. That same year, additional leases for building ground on the northern side of Clarendon Street were advertised.

No. 14 was among the earliest houses built on the street, erected together with the adjoining Nos. 12–20 before 1856 and first recorded in Griffith's Valuation in that year. This original terrace of five three-storey buildings was leased by the Rev. Henry Wallace, Moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster in 1839, and No. 14 was individually valued at £25. Following Wallace's death in 1887, Nos. 12–16 continued to be held by his personal estate through to the end of the Annual Revisions. The building's valuation was reduced to £21 in 1902, at which level it remained until the Annual Revisions were discontinued in 1931. The 1901 census building return recorded No. 14 as a first-class building containing ten inhabited rooms. Throughout its history the occupants of Clarendon Street were drawn from the city's merchant and professional classes. From 1902, No. 14 was occupied by Samuel Donnell, an accountant who also worked as an estate agent and broker for the Belfast and Dublin Stock Exchange. Between 1931 and 1935 the entire row of Nos. 6–26 Clarendon Street was acquired by Jennie Steen, who continued to own No. 14 through to the end of the Second Revaluation of 1956–72, by which point its value had risen to £31 and it was still recorded as a private dwelling.

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. 14 was subsequently listed in 1979. Records held by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency note that the original sash windows were replaced and the front elevation repointed in 1983. By 1988 the building had been converted from a dwelling to offices, at which time the two-storey rear extension was added to provide additional office space. In 1994 the current gates and railings were installed to the front, and in 1995 further repair works were carried out including reslating of the roof and repointing of the brickwork and chimneys.

By the late 20th century most of the mid-Victorian townhouses along Clarendon Street had been converted to office use by local dentists, solicitors and accountancy firms, with few remaining as residential properties. 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."