6 Queen St., Londonderry

6 Queen Street is a terraced former townhouse of three storeys with an attic, built around 1847 as one of a uniform row of eight similar houses lining the west side of Queen Street, Londonderry. The building is rectangular on plan, faces east, and has a two-storey return to the rear. It sits within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area and, together with the other seven houses in the terrace, forms an important group of early Victorian townhouses that represent some of the earliest terraced dwellings in the area.

The building is rendered throughout on the front elevation, with hand-made red brick laid in English garden wall bond with cement pointing to the rear, and plain cement render to the ground floor and return. The pitched roof is covered in natural slate with black clay ridge tiles, and there are two rendered chimneystacks with clay pots rising from both party walls. Cast-iron guttering is carried on iron drive-through brackets. A flat-roofed dormer window with timber casement windows was inserted to the front roof pitch around 1960 and is considered an inappropriate later addition. Plastic rainwater goods have been fitted to the rear elevation.

The front elevation is two bays wide. Window openings are square-headed, with painted masonry sills and single-pane timber sash windows; largely replacement timber casement windows have been fitted to the rear and return elevations. The principal feature of the front elevation is a three-centred arched door opening to the left, which retains its original timber doorcase. The door itself is a painted, four-flat-panelled timber door flanked by engaged fluted Doric columns supporting a lintel cornice with mutules. Above the door is an original webbed fanlight with a glazed hub. The door threshold is tiled and opens directly onto the footpath. The south side elevation abuts No. 5, and the north side elevation abuts No. 7. To the rear, the two-storey rendered return has a replacement timber door opening into a small paved yard enclosed by a rendered wall with a replacement sheeted timber door.

Although the building has undergone internal alterations and gained the intrusive dormer window, it retains much of its original external fabric, and the quality and completeness of the doorcase in particular make it an architecturally significant component of the terrace.

Queen Street was originally laid out around 1840, with buildings constructed along it by at least 1847. Its development, along with that of the adjoining Great James Street and Clarendon Street, was driven by significant economic and population growth in Londonderry during the period 1825 to 1850. As the historian John Hume has noted, this era saw the reconstruction of buildings within the city walls alongside the first development of housing outside the walls, at Bogside and Edenballymore. Queen Street was the second major new street in the area, following Great James Street which had been laid out around 1833.

The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1830 shows that the Queen Street area was still rural hinterland at that date, with the city's streets having extended no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street, and William Street. In the early decades of the 19th century, the only significant construction north of the walls had been isolated institutions — the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum, and Foyle College — with almost no domestic architecture. The sole surviving building in the area that predates the early Victorian development is Foyle Cottage, a Regency house built around 1815. Robert Simpson, writing in his Annals of Derry published in 1847, recorded that the district covered by Great James Street, William Street, Little James Street, and surrounding lanes had originally comprised meadow ground without a single house.

The development of this area began in the late Georgian period and continued into the Victorian era, with uniform rows of three-storey townhouses establishing a new and fashionable quarter that quickly became the preferred address 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, produced in 1847, recorded the street as Queen's Street and noted that at least twelve houses had been built along it by that year. The plan confirms that Nos. 1 to 8 Queen Street are among the earliest terraced dwellings within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area. No. 6 is depicted on O'Hagan's 1847 plan with a rear outbuilding that has since been demolished. The layout of Nos. 1 to 8 had not changed by the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1853, and no further buildings had been added to the street in the intervening years.

Griffith's Valuation of 1856 records that Nos. 1 to 8 Queen Street were leased to tenants by Thomas Major, a landowner resident in Creggan. No. 6 was valued at £17 and occupied by a Mr. Hamill Smyth. Despite Thomas Major's death in 1858, the estate continued to administer Nos. 2 to 8 Queen Street until the cancellation of the Annual Revisions in 1931, by which point the valuation of No. 6 had been reduced to £15 10s. The 1911 Census records the property as occupied by Mr. J. McMonagle, a local publican, and describes it as a second-class dwelling comprising seven main rooms. By 1935, ownership had passed to a Ms. Clara Craig, and the First Revaluation of that year increased the assessed value to £21. The Craig estate retained ownership through the Second Revaluation of 1956 to 1972, which marginally increased the value to £23.

In 1978, the Department of the Environment designated the mid-19th century streets and terraces as a Conservation Area, defined as an area of special architectural or historic interest, the character of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance. The group of houses at Nos. 1 to 8 Queen Street was subsequently listed in 1980. The architectural historian Calley described Nos. 1 to 8 as the earliest buildings along Queen Street, noting their smooth rendered three-storey, two-bay elevations with deep-set square-headed window bays and round-headed doorways, diminished-scale second-storey bays, timber-framed doorways with Doric columns supporting dentilled entablatures, and simple spider-web fanlights, adding that most retain their glazing bars and their large, deep chimneys, though finishes have been altered over the years.

Few of the mid-Victorian townhouses along Queen Street remain in residential use today; most of the three-storey buildings were converted into offices for dentists, solicitors, and accountancy firms during the late 20th century. No. 6 Queen Street was converted from a private dwelling into office space in 1984.