9 Queen St., Londonderry

9 Queen Street, Londonderry

This is a Victorian end-of-terrace townhouse of three storeys with an attic, built around 1847 as one of a matching group of four. It forms a group with numbers 10, 11 and 12 Queen Street, and sits within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area. Although Victorian in date, the building was deliberately designed to adopt the scale and proportions of earlier Georgian terraces. It has since been converted to office use.

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The building is rectangular on plan, with three bays on the principal elevation, which faces east onto the west side of Queen Street. A three-storey rear return projects to the west. The roof is pitched and covered in natural slate with black clay ridge tiles, and there is a red brick chimney stack with clay pots rising from the south side. Cast-iron guttering is carried on iron drive-through brackets.

The principal east elevation is built in red brick laid in Flemish bond with cement pointing, set behind a low-level rendered plinth wall with a concrete coping. All window openings are square-headed and sit on painted masonry sills. On the ground floor, the window bays align with those above: to the right of the entrance doorway there is a 1-over-1 timber sliding sash window. The entrance doorway is slightly recessed and elliptically arched, flanked by engaged fluted columns of the Doric order. The door itself is a raised-and-fielded four-panel painted timber door, with a dentilled entablature above and a webbed Adam-style fanlight. The door is reached by three steps up from the pavement. The first and second floors have 1-over-1 timber sliding sash windows throughout. A large slate-clad central dormer with a slate pitched roof and a 1-over-1 timber sliding sash window sits at roof level, flanked on either side by a modern rooflight.

The north elevation is abutted by number 10 Queen Street. The south elevation, facing Clyde Street, is finished in smooth unpainted render. It has two windows to the right at first and second-floor half-landing levels, and a single window slightly off-centre at attic level. The rear return has a non-symmetrical window pattern, with two windows at first and second floors; these side elevation windows are replacement uPVC casement units.

The west rear elevation is three storeys high, built in hand-made red brick laid in English Garden Wall bond. The rear return is finished in smooth plain painted render with a slated pitched roof built at half-landing height. Window openings are square-headed on unpainted masonry sills. The fenestration pattern on the rear and return is irregular, with a mixture of timber sliding sash and largely replacement timber single-pane casement windows. A blind window on the third floor has been recently concealed with red brick. A pitched slate roof with black clay ridge tiles covers this section, with a red brick chimney stack carrying seven clay pots rising from the south side. Cast-iron half-round guttering on iron drive-through brackets terminates at a circular downpipe to the front elevation; painted aluminium rainwater goods serve the side and rear.

In summary: the roof is natural slate to the principal slopes, with artificial slate to the north-facing slope of the return; rainwater goods are cast iron to the east elevation and aluminium to the south and west; walling is red brick to the east, render to the south and west; and windows are timber sliding sash to the east, uPVC casement to the south and west.

INTERIOR

The original two-room plan form survives. However, much of the interior detailing has been removed in the course of conversion to offices, and the wall-head dormer to the front has also been altered. Despite these losses, significant original fabric and historic character remain.

SETTING

Number 9 forms part of a terrace of four similar houses lining the west side of Queen Street, within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area. The gable end of number 12, at the southern end of the terrace, abuts Clyde Street. The front entrance path is paved in concrete block pavers and is ramped to provide level access with the pavement. A hardscape area to the right of the door is set behind a smooth rendered wall. To the rear there is a small yard enclosed by a rendered wall, with a large two-storey rear return. A side yard at Clyde Street is bounded by hit-and-miss timber fencing and is unfinished.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Queen Street was first laid out around 1840 and was characterised from an early stage by mid-19th-century terraced houses. Its development, along with that of the adjoining Great James Street and Clarendon Street, was driven by a remarkable period of economic and population growth in Londonderry during the mid-19th century. As the historian John Hume records, during the period 1825 to 1850 reconstruction of buildings within the city walls took place alongside, for the first time, the 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 for the townland of Edenballymore shows the Queen Street area as rural hinterland with few significant structures. At that date, the city's streets extended no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street and William Street. In the early decades of the 19th century, the only major construction north of the walls had been isolated institutional buildings such as the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum, and Foyle College, with virtually no domestic architecture. The only building in the area predating the early-Victorian development is Foyle Cottage, a Regency house constructed around 1815. Robert Simpson, writing in his Annals of Derry, published in 1847, recorded that the entire district now covered by Great James Street, William Street, Little James Street and the surrounding lanes had originally comprised meadow ground without a house.

With the construction of uniform rows of neat three-storey townhouses, a new affluent area was established that swiftly became the preferred residence 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 town planning, and the development represented the most ambitious project of town planning carried out 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 originally as Queen's Street and showed at least 12 houses constructed along the row by that date. Numbers 9 to 12 Queen Street are among the earliest terraced dwellings in the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, having been built by at least 1847. Number 9 was depicted on O'Hagan's 1847 plan with a rear return and an outbuilding, the latter since demolished and replaced with a modern return. The layout of numbers 9 to 12 had not changed by the time of the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1853, and no further buildings had been added to the street in the intervening period.

Griffith's Valuation of 1856 recorded that numbers 9 and 10 Queen Street were owned by a Mr Samuel Jackson, and that number 9 was valued at £38 and occupied by a Mr Pechall Irvine. The building remained in the hands of the Jackson estate until 1925, when ownership passed to a Mr John Madden, who retained it until the 1970s. Throughout this period the occupants of the Queen Street dwellings were drawn from the merchant and professional classes. In 1911, number 9 was occupied by M. Cunningham, a local grocer; the census building return described it as a first-class dwelling with ten inhabited rooms.

Under the First General Revaluation of 1935, the value of the property was slightly increased to £39. The Second General Revaluation of 1956 to 1972 raised it further to £48. In 1965 the former private dwelling was converted into office premises for the Roman Catholic voluntary organisation the Legion of Mary.

The building underwent extensive remedial work in 1983 to 1984, when its rainwater goods were replaced with cast iron and its interior was treated for dry rot. The current wall-head dormer was added in 2002 as a replacement for the original, which had previously been lost.

In 1970 the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide to Derry noted that numbers 9 to 12 Queen Street were considered not as well handled as the similar numbers 13 to 16 Queen Street, which the guide regarded as the most impressive Georgian-style terrace in the area. Numbers 9 to 12 were subsequently listed in 1979, following the designation of the Clarendon Street Conservation Area by the Department of the Environment in 1978.

In 2013, the architectural historian Calley described the group as a setback terrace of four large brick three-and-a-half-storey, three-bay houses with rendered reveals and wide round-headed doorways, noting that numbers 9 to 11 have inset Doric doorcases under spiderweb fanlights, and 1-over-1 timber sash windows. He observed that numbers 9 to 11 have wall-head dormers that look a little out of place on the traditional Georgian facades. He singled out number 9 for particular criticism on account of its recently added wall-head dormer — describing it as unfortunate on a listed historic building, though acknowledging it may replace a long-missing original — and noted the incongruity of uPVC casement windows on the cement-rendered Clyde Street side elevation, contrasting with the original large expanse of mottled brick visible on the side elevation of number 12.

Few of the mid-19th-century townhouses along Queen Street remain in residential use; most, including number 9, have been converted to office premises for professional firms in the late 20th century.