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

27 Fountain Street is a modest mid-terrace Victorian townhouse, two storeys tall with two bays and an attic, built around 1883 as one of a uniform row of fourteen similar houses lining the north-west side of Fountain Street, Londonderry. The architect is unknown. It sits within the Historic City Conservation Area and shares group value with Nos. 9–35 Fountain Street, though it retains insufficient original historic fabric to merit individual listing.

The house is rectangular on plan, built in polychromatic brick with a natural slate pitched roof — now replaced with fibre cement — and red ridge tiles. A small single-storey rear return projects to the rear, covered by a corrugated steel monopitch roof.

The principal south-east elevation faces onto Fountain Street, set back to the pavement line and overlooking former industrial buildings on the opposite side of the street. The brickwork is laid in English Garden Wall bond, with Victorian industrial brick dressings in a contrasting colour throughout. The eaves are finished with an ornamental projecting brick cornice, below which runs a double band of black brick dressings. Continuous decorative stringcourses in contrasting black brick appear on both the ground and first floors at sill and head level, with a further row of black brick separated by three courses of red above the sill and below the head level. All window and door openings have segmental arched heads with red brick voussoirs, with three black bricks at the centre forming a keystoned detail. On the ground floor there is one segmental arch-headed window opening; the first floor has two. The entrance door opening is also segmental arch-headed, one step up from the pavement, fitted with a six-panel stained hardwood front door and a plain segmental-headed fanlight above. Ground and first floor windows are stained hardwood casements with top-opening lights; all sills have a painted finish.

The north-east and south-west sides are abutted by the adjoining terraced properties, No. 25 and No. 29 Fountain Street respectively. The north-west rear elevation is finished in painted render. Window openings to the rear have been infilled with timber boarding. The south-east boundary of the site is formed by the historic city walls. A redbrick chimney stack rises from the north-east side, centred on the ridge, with six clay pots; it has double bands of black brick below a double projecting decorative sawtooth brick course, below a rendered capping. Rainwater goods are uPVC with half-round gutters on drive-through brackets to both front and rear.

Fountain Street is one of the earliest streets to have been developed outside the walled city of Londonderry. According to historian D. Calley, buildings on this site were depicted on maps as early as 1685, and the street may have been developed 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 purposes. The street had acquired its 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 show that Fountain Street originally extended from Ferryquay Street around the city walls before terminating on Bishop Street.

The previous terrace on this stretch, between Ferryquay Street and Hawkin Street, consisted of a number of irregular-sized buildings leased by Hamilton Graham, a local bookkeeper who resided on Northland Road. This earlier row was demolished and replaced in 1883 with the current uniform terrace of two-storey, two-bay red-brick houses. The replacement terrace continued to be leased by Hamilton Graham until his death in 1892, and was occupied by working-class labourers, the majority of whom worked in neighbouring factories and local industries — many almost certainly employed at the Welch Margetson Shirt Factory on the opposite side of the street.

The terrace first appeared in plan form on the circa 1873–1910 Annual Revisions Town Plan for Londonderry. Valuation records note that No. 11 Fountain Street was valued at £8 following the terrace's completion. Historical records relating to the broader terrace give a sense of how these houses were used: the 1901 census described No. 11 as a second-class dwelling of six rooms with a coal house as its sole outbuilding. Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57), the value of No. 11 was raised to £12, and it was purchased by the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy on Pump Street in 1945. Under the Second Revaluation (1956–72), its value was further raised to £15 and 10 shillings.

The street sits just outside and backing onto the historic city walls, between New Gate and Ferryquay Gate, and to the east of St Columb's Cathedral. In the 1970s the stretch of Fountain Street extending from Hawkin Street to Bishop Street was demolished and redeveloped as a modern housing estate. As Calley records, this 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 late 20th-century redevelopment. The 1970 Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide to Londonderry described the character of Fountain Street in these 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." The terrace was included in the Historic City Conservation Area in 2006, and the Conservation Area Design Guide noted that it "displays the Victorian taste for polychrome brickwork derived from the Venetian Gothic."

The terrace as a whole is a remnant of the once strong industrial working-class character of the Fountain area, which supplied workers for Londonderry's shirt-making and shipbuilding industries during the city's prosperous late Victorian period.