Foyle Cottage, Clarendon Street, Londonderry, County Londonderry, BT48 7ER

Foyle Cottage is a fine detached late Georgian house built around 1815 in a modest Regency style, set in its own grounds on the south side of Clarendon Street in the townland of Edenballymore, Londonderry. It is sited perpendicular to the street, with its principal elevation facing east over the garden and its rear elevation fronting directly onto Princes Street. The building retains much of its original historic fabric and character, with only minor alterations dating from around 1938.

The symmetrical two-storey, five-bay principal facade is arranged as a central block flanked by gabled single-bay projecting wings at either end. The roof is a slated hipped form with clay ridge tiles. Symmetrical chimney stacks sit on the mid-ridge to each wing at the front, with two further stacks to the rear of the central block. The walls are painted stucco, finished with decorative timber eaves and cast iron rainwater goods. At ground floor level on the central block, original timber canted bay windows contain sliding sash windows. The remaining windows to the principal elevation are replacement tri-partite timber casement windows.

The front entrance door is a notable feature: a double-panelled painted timber door with brass fittings and a threshold, flanked by carved pilasters and console brackets, and surmounted by an Adam-style rectangular fanlight. Three steps lead up to the entrance, with a boot scraper on either side.

The rear elevation facing Princes Street is irregularly fenestrated, also of two storeys, with the lower windows sitting at pavement level. At first floor level there are two elaborate tri-partite sliding sash windows with glazing bars set at 45-degree angles.

The garden to the front contains a large copper beech tree and is enclosed by a boundary wall. Gables of adjacent buildings lie to the east and south.

Foyle Cottage is of considerable historical significance as the oldest building incorporated within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, predating the laying out of the surrounding early Victorian streets of Clarendon Street, Great James Street and Queen Street. When first constructed around 1815, the cottage would have stood in an unspoiled country setting on the northern edge of the city. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1830 depicts it as a rectangular building situated between William Street and Asylum Road, at that time possessing a small gate lodge on the Strand Road (demolished before 1853) and a large garden stretching down the hill towards the quayside. By 1830 the cottage had already become neighboured by several significant public buildings marking the beginning of Derry's northern expansion: the Lunatic Asylum (constructed 1825–29) and Foyle College (1814) to the north, and the Infirmary (1810) and Christ Church (1830) to the west. Robert Simpson, writing in The Annals of Derry in 1847, described the entire district now covered by Great James Street, William Street, Little James Street and the surrounding lanes as having originally comprised meadow ground without a house, though the 1830 Ordnance Survey map clearly shows Foyle Cottage already in existence.

The Ordnance Survey Memoirs record that Foyle Cottage was the residence of William Scott Esq. in the 1830s. Scott was the founder of Londonderry's celebrated shirt industry: having established a small local weaving business in the early 19th century, the remarkable success of his product forced him to expand his enterprise, increase his workforce and establish new factories and warehouses to fulfil orders from Glasgow, London and as far afield as Australia. The Townland Valuations of 1831 set the rateable value of Foyle Cottage and its lodge at £20.

Scott had vacated the property by 1856, when Griffith's Valuation recorded the occupant as a Mr. Smyth Osbourne, who leased the cottage from the Reverend Henry Wallace, Moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster in 1839. Smyth Osbourne was an agent with Imperial Fire Insurance and resided at Foyle Cottage until 1893. The development of Clarendon Street had commenced by 1856 but Foyle Cottage and its garden remained undisturbed; the street had extended only as far as Queen Street by the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1853. The remainder of the houses on Clarendon Street were built in the decade between 1856 and 1866, a development that necessitated the sale of part of the cottage's garden as Clarendon Street was extended past the north gable, cutting off access to the former gate lodge on the Strand Road. Griffith's Valuation of 1856 noted the property's value had risen to £24.

In 1893 the site was purchased outright from the estate of Reverend Wallace by Mr. John Chase, a draper operating J. Chase & Co. from premises in The Diamond. The Annual Revisions record that a greenhouse to the east of the house was constructed in that year by Chase at a cost of £20, and the property's value was slightly raised to £25, at which it remained until the cancellation of the Annual Revisions in 1931. The First Revaluation of 1935 records a Ms. Margaret Browne in possession of the dwelling, with the value raised to £43, remaining unchanged through the Second Revaluation of 1956–72. Information provided by the current owner in October 2015 states that Foyle Cottage was acquired by the Madden family in 1908, with a ground rent of £9.5.6 paid to Miss Margaret Browne of 49 Clarendon Street; this is not documented in the 1898–1910 valuation book.

The Ulster Architectural Heritage Society noted in 1970 that Foyle Cottage was most likely erected around 1815, making it broadly contemporary with the former Foyle College on the Strand Road, with which it shares a distinctive Georgian design — both buildings consisting of a central block flanked by adjoining wings. The Society described the cottage as a part one- and part two-storey house sited at right angles to the street, with a symmetrical facade overlooking the garden and slight projecting gabled wings. Architectural historian D. Calley described it as a charming rendered Regency house, a good example of the Georgian use of simple forms and love of symmetry — three rectangles comprising a central block under a hipped roof with symmetrically placed gabled side blocks — and praised the way the building opens a gap in the long terraces and fills it with an ancient copper beech whose foliage spills past the building line, calling it a plain but very pleasing composition offering a gentle rebuke to some of the exuberance of nearby later buildings.

Foyle Cottage was listed in 1979. The Department of the Environment had included it within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area the previous year, defined as an area of special architectural or historic interest the character of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance. It remains one of the few buildings on Clarendon Street still in use as a private domestic dwelling, the majority of the street's three-storey houses having been converted to offices for dental, accountancy and solicitors practices in the late 20th century.