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

31 Fountain Street is a mid-terrace, two-storey, two-bay Victorian townhouse built in 1883 as one of fourteen similar houses forming a stepped terrace along the north-west side of Fountain Street, Londonderry. The architect is unknown. It forms part of a uniform row — Nos. 9–35 Fountain Street — and sits within the Historic City Conservation Area, though it is not individually listed and is recorded here for its group value with the wider terrace.

The building is rectangular in plan, with its principal elevation facing south-east onto Fountain Street, set back at the pavement edge. The roof is a pitched natural slate finish with black ridge tiles. A large red brick chimney stack rises from the north-east side, centred on the ridge, carrying six clay pots, with a double band of black brick below a projecting decorative brick course and render above the projection.

The south-east (principal) elevation is built in English Garden Wall brick bond, with Victorian brickwork dressings in contrasting colours characteristic of polychromatic Victorian construction — a style the Conservation Area Design Guide describes as reflecting "the Victorian taste for polychrome brickwork derived from the Venetian Gothic." There is an ornamental projecting brick cornice at eaves level, with a double band of black brick below it. Continuous decorative brick stringcourses in contrasting black run along both ground and first floor levels, at sill and head positions, with a further row of black brick separated by three courses of red above sill level and below head level. All window and door openings have red brick voussoirs to their heads, with three bricks at the centre forming a keystone detail. On the ground floor there is a single segmental arch-headed window opening; on the first floor there are two segmental arch-headed window openings. The entrance doorway is also segmental arch-headed, set one step up from the pavement. At the time of survey all openings were boarded up, with graphic panels depicting a six-panel door and windows in their original positions. All sills have a painted finish.

The north-east and south-west sides are abutted by the adjoining terrace properties: No. 29 to the north-east and No. 33 to the south-west. The north-west (rear) elevation is of painted rendered finish, with a single window opening at ground, first floor and attic levels to the left, and a single door opening to the ground floor on the right, which was boarded at the time of survey.

The rainwater goods to the front (south-east) elevation are cast iron guttering; to the rear (north-west) the guttering is half-round uPVC on drive-through brackets. The rear yard has its south-east boundary formed by the historic city walls.

In terms of setting, the terrace sits just outside and backing onto the historic city walls, between New Gate and Ferry Quay Gate, to the east of St Columb's Cathedral. The opposite side of Fountain Street is lined with former industrial buildings with natural slate pitched roofs.

Fountain Street has a long history of occupation. It is one of the earliest streets to have developed outside the walled city: maps as early as 1685 depict houses on the site, and the street may have been settled almost immediately after the city walls were built, initially only on the side of the street away from the walls, which would have been 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 1848–49 Ordnance Survey Town Plan and the Annual Revisions map of circa 1873–1910 record that Fountain Street originally extended from Ferryquay Street around the city walls before terminating at Bishop Street. Before the present terrace was built, the stretch between Ferryquay Street and Hawkin Street contained a number of irregular-sized buildings leased by Hamilton Graham, a local bookkeeper who resided on the Northland Road. This earlier row was demolished and replaced with the current uniform two-storey two-bay terrace in 1883. The new terrace continued to be leased by Hamilton Graham (who died in 1892) and was occupied by working-class labourers, the majority of whom worked in the neighbouring factories and local industries — many undoubtedly employed by the Welch Margetson Shirt Factory on the opposite side of the street.

The first recorded occupant of No. 11 Fountain Street (the best-documented house in the terrace, whose records illuminate the wider terrace's history) was James McGonigle, a bank messenger whose wife and daughter were machinists in a local factory. The 1901 census described No. 11 as a second-class dwelling of six rooms with a coal house as its sole outbuilding, valued at £8 following completion of the terrace. Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57) the value was raised to £12; the property was occupied by a Mr Robert Greer in the 1930s and purchased by the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy on Pump Street in 1945. Under the Second Revaluation (1956–72) the house was occupied by a Mr A. Shields and the value had risen further to £15 and 10 shillings.

In 1970 the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society's guide to Londonderry described Fountain Street as typified by "relatively narrow streets, two-storey brick houses, stepped roofs and the small domestic scale of the dwellings." During the 1970s the stretch of Fountain Street from Hawkin Street to Bishop Street was demolished and redeveloped as a modern housing estate. That clearance obliterated an entire neighbourhood including 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 are among the very few terraces to have survived this redevelopment. A flat-roof rear return was added to No. 11 in the late 20th century.

The terrace was included within the Historic City Conservation Area in 2006. It survives as a remnant of the once-strong industrial working-class character of the Fountain area, which supplied workers to Londonderry's shirt-making and shipbuilding industries during the city's prosperous late-Victorian period.