12 Queen Street, Londonderry, Co. Londonderry, BT48 7EG

12 Queen Street, Londonderry

This is a former townhouse, built around 1847 as one of a terrace of four similar buildings, now in use as offices. It is an end-of-terrace, three-storey-with-attic, three-bay structure of red brick construction, located on the west side of Queen Street within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area. Although Victorian in date, the building deliberately adopts the scale and proportions of earlier Georgian terraces. It shares group value with nos. 9, 10 and 11 Queen Street. The listing extends to the house itself, the boundary walling and the outbuilding.

Architectural Description

The building is rectangular on plan, with its principal elevation facing east. It has three- and two-storey rendered rear returns, and a separate two-storey gabled outbuilding at the far end of the plot that runs parallel to the main building and encloses the rear yard. Although the building is currently subdivided into four individual office premises — one on each floor — the original plan form is largely intact.

The roof is covered in natural slate with black clay ridge tiles. A red brick chimney stack with seven clay pots rises from the south side. Projecting eaves support cast iron painted half-round guttering on rise-and-fall brackets, discharging to a cast iron hopper and circular downpipe to the front; grey PVC rainwater goods serve the side and rear.

Principal (East) Elevation

The front wall is of red brick laid in Flemish bond, currently concealed beneath brick-coloured paint, and sits behind a low rendered plinth wall with a profiled stone coping, all painted. All window openings are square-headed, set on painted masonry sills, with the bays on the ground floor aligned with those above. The ground floor windows have been replaced with timber casement windows fitted with top-hung night vents.

The entrance doorway is elliptically arched and slightly recessed, framed by a projecting door surround with engaged fluted columns of the Ionic order to either side. The door itself is a raised-and-fielded four-panel painted timber door, surmounted by a dentilled entablature and a plain fanlight. The door opens onto three steps above pavement level. First and second floor windows are timber sliding sash with 1/1 panes. Centrally positioned at attic level is a dormer with a slated duo-pitched roof, lead cheeks, and a replacement timber sliding sash window with 1/1 panes.

North (Gable) Elevation

The gable end is blank, built of variegated red brick in Flemish bond with clipped eaves.

South Elevation

This elevation is abutted by no. 11 Queen Street.

Rear (West) Elevation

The rear of the main building is three storeys with attic and two bays wide, with a gabled return to the right side. The main building and rear return are finished in smooth unpainted render. The rear return drops from three storeys to two, and is then abutted by a single-storey monopitched addition. All window openings are square-headed on unpainted masonry sills.

Original windows surviving to the rear include a 1/1 timber sliding sash to the first floor (with vertical metal bars), 6/6 timber sliding sash windows to the second floor on the left side of the main building, and an 8/4 timber sliding sash above the return on the right side. The ground floor opening to the main building has been blocked up and rendered over; the outline of a former lean-to, now removed, is visible as a change in the render finish, and a terracotta tiled floor is exposed within the corner of the yard. A single-storey flat-roofed concrete block structure with a vertically boarded timber door and overlight abuts the ground floor at the location of the missing window. The west elevations of both the three- and two-storey gabled returns are blank, with all openings positioned within the north face.

The three-storey return is one bay wide and has timber sliding sash windows to the first and second floors with 6/1 and 6/6 panes respectively. The two-storey return is two bays wide, with a 6/6 sliding sash window to the right side at first floor level, a similar timber casement window to the left side, and a timber casement window and a modern flush door at ground floor level opening onto the yard. The single-storey monopitched addition is fully modernised and of little architectural interest.

Interior

The internal joinery and plasterwork are of particular interest and are largely intact. The original 6/6 sash windows to the rear are also noted as significant surviving features.

Setting

No. 12 forms part of a terrace of four similar houses lining the west side of Queen Street. The front entrance is reached via three concrete steps above pavement level. A painted smooth rendered wall, ruled and lined to resemble ashlar stone, encloses a small yard to the right of the door. Boundary walling to the front, complete with profiled stone coping, and to the side further enhances the quality of the setting. To the rear, the plot is enclosed by a variegated red brick wall terminating in the two-storey rendered gabled outbuilding. An alleyway to the right of the front elevation, secured by modern double black-painted metal gates, also provides access to the rear of nos. 29–51 Clarendon Street. The building sits within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area.

Historical Context

Queen Street was originally laid out around 1840, with buildings constructed along the street by at least 1847. Its development, along with that of the adjoining Great James Street and Clarendon Street, was driven by a period of economic and population growth in Londonderry during the mid-19th century. As the historian John Hume records, during the period 1825–1850 reconstruction of buildings within the city walls took place alongside, for the first time, the development of housing outside the walls at Bogside and Edenballymore. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey maps (1830) for the townland of Edenballymore — in which Queen Street sits — recorded the area as rural hinterland with few significant structures. At that date, the city's streets extended no further north than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street and William Street. The only significant buildings constructed north of the walls in the early decades of the 19th century were isolated institutions such as the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum and Foyle College, with little or no domestic architecture erected in the same period. The only building in the area that predates the early Victorian development is Foyle Cottage, a Regency house constructed around 1815.

Queen Street was the second major new street in the area, following Great James Street which had been laid out around 1833. Robert Simpson, in his Annals of Derry (1847), recorded that the entire district covered by Great James Street, William Street, Little James Street and the surrounding lanes had originally comprised meadow ground without a house. With the construction of uniform rows of neat three-storey townhouses, a new affluent area was established that swiftly became the preferred residence of the city's merchant and professional classes. The geometric street pattern of Clarendon Street, Great James Street and Queen Street was characteristic of Georgian urban planning and represented the most ambitious town planning project in Londonderry since the construction of the walled city between 1613 and 1619.

O'Hagan's contemporary plan of Londonderry (1847) — which records the street as Queen's Street, the name having switched back and forth throughout its history — shows that at least twelve houses had been constructed along the row by that date, and depicts no. 12 already possessing a rear return and outbuilding (the original outbuilding has since been demolished and replaced with a modern return). The layout of nos. 9–12 had not changed by the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1853, and no further buildings were constructed along the street in the intervening period.

Griffith's Valuation of 1856 records that no. 12 Queen Street was owned by Bartholomew McCorkell, who later served as Mayor of Londonderry in 1861 and was head of the McCorkell Shipping Line, which operated transatlantic crossings between 1778 and 1897. In 1856 McCorkell leased the property to a Mr. James Donnellan, with the building valued at £45. The house remained in McCorkell family ownership until the 1930s. Throughout its history, the occupants of Queen Street dwellings were drawn from the city's merchant and professional classes.

The census of 1911 records no. 12 as occupied by John Thompson, a local painter, and describes it as a first-class dwelling consisting of nine rooms. The First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland records that ownership had passed to a Mr. J. B. Smith by 1935, when the building's value was increased to £54. A Mr. S. S. Thompson had taken over ownership by the Second Revaluation (1956–72), when the assessed value decreased to £44.

The mid-19th century streets and terraces of Queen Street, Great James Street and Clarendon Street were designated a Conservation Area by the Department of the Environment in 1978, as an area of special architectural or historic interest, the character of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance. Nos. 9–12 Queen Street were subsequently listed in 1979.

In 1970, the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide for Derry considered nos. 9–12 Queen Street to be not as well handled as nos. 13–16 Queen Street, which it regarded as the most impressive Georgian-style terrace in the area. By 2013, however, Calley described nos. 9–12 as a setback terrace of four large brick three-and-a-half-storey, three-bay houses with rendered reveals and wide round-headed doorways, noting that nos. 9–11 have inset Doric doorcases under spiderweb fanlights, and that the 1/1 timber sash windows demonstrate the weakness of this window type on such large plain surfaces; he also observed that the wall-head dormers on nos. 9–11 look a little out of place on the traditional Georgian facades. Calley singles out no. 12 as the best or at least the most distinctive of the four, noting that its door surround projects to form a shallow porch with Ionic columns, that it has ground floor casement windows which he considers even odder than its neighbours' windows, and that it has a more traditional roof dormer. In contrast to the side elevation of no. 9, which has been re-rendered in cement, no. 12 retains what Calley describes as a wonderful huge mass of mottled brick to its side elevation.

In 1988, the building's chimney was repaired, the roof was re-slated and the exterior brickwork was repointed, as recorded in the Pink Files held by NIEA Historic Buildings Records.

Few of the mid-19th century townhouses along Queen Street continue to be used as residential dwellings; the majority were converted to office use by local dental, legal and accountancy firms in the late 20th century. No. 12 is currently occupied by a local solicitor's firm.

Condition and Significance

The survival of most of the original external fabric — including the boundary walls to the front and side and the two-storey outbuilding to the rear — together with a fine and largely intact interior, makes this a very good example of its type. The internal joinery, plasterwork and original rear sash windows are of particular interest. The painted front facade and the modern casement windows to the ground floor are noted as detractors, but do not substantially undermine the overall quality of the building.