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

No. 44 Clarendon Street is a mid-terrace, two-bay, three-storey with attic, red brick Georgian-style townhouse built in 1864. It forms part of a row of eleven similar houses lining the north side of Clarendon Street, and shares group value with Nos. 6–42 and 46–48, which were constructed over an eight-year period. The house retains much of its original character and detailing, and sits within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, whose well-preserved setting adds to its interest.

Architecture and External Appearance

The building is rectangular on plan with a projecting rear return. The principal elevation faces south onto Clarendon Street, set behind a low red brick wall with concrete capping, part of which is missing. A single concrete step leads to a raised front yard.

The roof is pitched and slated, with modern roof lights to both front and rear, black clay ridge tiles, and a large brick chimney stack that runs parallel to and rises from the centre of the ridge, topped with ten clay pots. Cast-iron guttering and circular downpipes serve the front elevation. Notably, this ridge chimney arrangement differs from most of the other Georgian-style houses along the north side of Clarendon Street, which have large side chimneys on the ridge; Nos. 42–44 are the exception to this pattern.

The principal south-facing front elevation is laid in Flemish bond red brick. All windows are two-over-two timber sliding sash within square-headed openings, set in painted cement-rendered reveals with painted sills. The entrance doorway has a three-centred arched opening with a moulded cornice supported by columns of the Doric order on either side, enclosing a four-panelled painted timber door with a plain fanlight above. There is a single window to the right of the door at ground floor level, and two windows at each of the first and second floors, though the upper-floor windows are not aligned with the ground-floor openings. The second-floor windows have metal-framed window boxes.

The east and west elevations are abutted by the adjoining Nos. 42 and 46 Clarendon Street respectively. The north rear elevation is painted render, three storeys with attic, and is abutted by a three-storey pitched-roof rear return to the right. The fenestration at the rear is irregular, with timber sliding sash windows throughout and a door opening from the rear return onto the rear yard. The rear elevation was not fully visible at the time of survey.

Materials comprise slate roofing, cast-iron rainwater goods, brick walling, and timber windows.

Historical Context

Clarendon Street was laid out in the early Victorian period as part of an ambitious programme of urban expansion outside the walls of the city of Derry. Before this development, the area — located in the townland of Edenballymore — was rural hinterland. The first edition of the Ordnance Survey map of 1830 shows that the city's streets had extended no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street, and William Street at that date, with only isolated institutional buildings such as Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum, and Foyle College constructed north of the walls. The only surviving pre-Victorian domestic building in the vicinity is Foyle Cottage, a Regency house of around 1815.

As Robert Simpson recorded in his Annals of Derry (1847), the district that would become Great James's Street, William Street, and the surrounding lanes had originally been entirely meadow ground. The expansion of the city was driven by significant growth in the economy and population of Londonderry during the mid-19th century. John Hume records that between 1825 and 1850, reconstruction within the walled city took place alongside the first development of housing at Bogside and Edenballymore. The laying out of Clarendon Street, Great James Street, and Queen Street followed a geometric street pattern characteristic of Georgian town planning, representing the most ambitious planning exercise in Londonderry since the construction of the walled city in 1613–19.

The street appears in O'Hagan's 1847 plan of Londonderry under its original name of 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 George Villiers (1800–1870), Fourth Earl of Clarendon and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland between 1847 and 1852. The second edition Ordnance Survey map confirms the name had changed by at least 1853.

The first dwellings on Clarendon Street began to be built around 1853, though initially only the lower section of the street — between the Strand Road and Queen Street — had been laid out. Development progressed slowly through the 1850s. In 1851, Skipton and Miller advertised building ground on Clarendon Street, Queen Street, and Patrick Street to let in perpetuity. Griffith's Valuation of 1856 recorded only nine dwellings along the entire length of the street; in the same year, additional leases were advertised for building ground on the north side. No. 44 was constructed in 1864 as part of this second phase, built together with the adjoining Nos. 38–42 by William McIlwee, a carpenter and builder with business premises on Foyle Street.

When first assessed in the 1864 Annual Revisions, the house was valued at £21 and occupied by a Mr. John G. Ferguson. By 1885 ownership had passed to a Mr. Frances McPherson. The census building return of 1901 described the property as a first-class dwelling of ten rooms, occupied at that time by Mary Ann Mott, whose daughter worked as a local clothes designer. By the 1930s the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1935) records a Mr. John H. McCrea as owner, and the McCrea family continued to own the house into at least the 1970s. The Second Revaluation (1956–72) noted the value of No. 44 stood at £31 in 1982.

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. 44 was listed in 1979. Records held by NIEA note that the external façade was renovated in 1988 and the roof was re-slated in 1992. A photograph taken in 1978 shows that the property at that time had a modern dormer window to the front, which has since been removed. By at least 2004, the house had been converted into a number of self-contained residential flats, a use that continued at the time of the second survey. Throughout the history of the terrace, its occupants were drawn from the city's merchant and professional classes, though by the late 20th century the majority of the three-storey houses along Clarendon Street had been converted into offices for dentists, solicitors, and accountancy firms.

Writing in 2013, architectural historian D. 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 — three-and-a-half storeys, two bays, with most ground floors rather inelegantly squeezing in a doorway alongside two reduced-scale window bays, depressed arched recessed timber-framed doorways with simple segmented fanlights and thin Doric columns supporting entablatures. Calley also observed that No. 44's ridge chimney, parallel to the ridge rather than positioned to the side, distinguishes it from the majority of the terrace.