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

29 Fountain Street is a mid-terrace two-bay two-storey Victorian townhouse with a small single-storey rear return, built around 1883 as part of a uniform terrace of fourteen similar houses lining the north-west side of Fountain Street, Londonderry. The architect is unknown. The house is recorded but not listed in its own right, though it falls within the Historic City Conservation Area designated in 2006.

SITUATION AND SETTING

The terrace, numbered 11–35 Fountain Street, sits just outside and immediately backing onto the historic city walls, between New Gate and Ferry Quay Gate, and to the east of St Columb's Cathedral. The principal elevation faces south-east onto Fountain Street, overlooking former industrial buildings on the opposite side of the street. To the north-west, the rear boundary is formed by the historic city walls themselves. The flanking properties are No. 27 Fountain Street to the north-east and No. 31 to the south-west, with No. 29 abutted on both sides by its neighbours.

EXTERIOR

The principal south-east elevation is built in English Garden Wall brick bond using red brick with Victorian industrial brickwork dressings in a contrasting colour — a style that the Conservation Area Design Guide describes as displaying "the Victorian taste for polychrome brickwork derived from the Venetian Gothic." The most prominent decorative feature is an ornamental projecting brick cornice at eaves level, below which runs a double band of black brick dressings. Continuous decorative stringcourses in contrasting black brick appear at sill and head level on both the ground and first floors, with a further row of black brick separated by three courses of red above sill level and below head level.

There is one segmental arch-headed window opening on the ground floor and two on the first floor, all with red brick voussoirs to their heads and three black bricks at the centre forming a keystonelike detail. The entrance door opening is also segmental arch-headed, set one step up from the pavement, and fitted with a traditional four-panel painted timber front door with a plain segmental-headed fanlight above. Ground and first floor windows are four-over-four timber sliding sash, and all sills have a painted finish.

The roof is a pitched natural slate construction with roll-top red ridge tiles. A red brick chimney stack rises from the north-east side, centred on the ridge, and carries six clay pots, five of which are capped with lead. The stack is detailed with double bands of black brick below a double projecting plain brick course, beneath a rendered capping. Rainwater goods are cast aluminium with half-round gutters on drive-through brackets, fitted to both front and rear.

The rear north-west elevation is of painted rendered finish. A small single-storey lean-to return extension with a natural slate roof projects from the rear. Window openings to the rear appear to have been altered and are of square proportion, with concrete sills and top-hung casements.

INTERIOR

No interior details are recorded.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Fountain Street is one of the earliest streets to have been developed outside the walled city of Londonderry. According to the historian Calley, houses on the current site were depicted on maps as early as 1685, and the street may have been developed almost immediately after the city walls were built, originally only on the side of the street away from the walls, which would have been kept clear for defensive purposes. 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 circa 1873–1910 Annual Revisions map record that Fountain Street originally extended from Ferryquay Street around the city walls before terminating on Bishop Street. The Annual Revisions indicate that the previous terrace on this site, between Ferryquay Street and Hawkin Street, comprised a number of irregular-sized buildings leased by Hamilton Graham, a local bookkeeper who resided on the Northland Road. That earlier row was demolished and replaced in 1883 with the current uniform two-storey two-bay red-brick terrace.

The terrace continued to be leased by Hamilton Graham, who died in 1892, and was occupied by working-class labourers, the majority of whom were employed in the neighbouring factories and local industries — many almost certainly at the Welch Margetson Shirt Factory on the opposite side of the street. The new terrace first appeared in plan form on the circa 1873–1910 Annual Revisions Town Plan for Londonderry. Following completion of the terrace, No. 11 was valued at £8; the first recorded occupant was James McGonigle, a bank messenger whose wife and daughter were factory machinists. The 1901 census described No. 11 as a second-class dwelling with six rooms and a coal house as its sole outbuilding.

Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57), the value was raised to £12, and the record notes that the building was occupied by a Mr Robert Greer in the 1930s before being purchased in 1945 by the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy on Pump Street. Under the Second Revaluation (1956–72), the house was occupied by a Mr A. Shields and had been further raised in value to £15 and 10 shillings.

In 1970, the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide for Londonderry described Fountain Street in the following terms: "The relatively narrow streets, the two-storey brick houses, the stepped roofs and the small domestic scale of the dwellings and the streets are typical of the environment." During the 1970s, the stretch of Fountain Street extending from Hawkin Street to Bishop Street was demolished and the area redeveloped with a modern housing estate. Calley records that this demolition 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 only a small number of terraces to have survived this redevelopment, and they represent a remnant of the once strong industrial working-class character of the Fountain area, which provided workers for the local shirt-making and shipbuilding industries during Londonderry's prosperous late Victorian period. The terrace was included in the Historic City Conservation Area in 2006.

SIGNIFICANCE

No. 29 has retained its four-over-four timber sliding sash windows and its natural slate roof, but is considered to have insufficient individual architectural detail to merit statutory listing. Its significance lies primarily in its contribution to the group value of the surviving terrace and its place within the Historic City Conservation Area.