38 Great James Street, Londonderry, Co. Londonderry, BT48 7DA

38 Great James Street is a mid-Victorian, mid-terraced painted render dwelling of three storeys over a basement, built in 1871–72. It sits on the north side of Great James Street, a steep hill running between St. Eugene's Cathedral to the west and Strand Road to the east, in the Clarendon Street Conservation Area. The house was built at the same time as its immediate neighbours, numbers 36 and 40, and shares strong group value with them and the wider run of similar terraced dwellings along the street.

EXTERIOR

The building is rectangular on plan with a two-bay principal elevation facing south, accessed directly from street level by one step. The roof is pitched natural slate with clay ridge tiles, and a rebuilt red brick chimney stack with seven clay pots rises from the east side. Walls to the principal elevation are smooth painted render. Window openings are square-headed, set on painted masonry sills, with a continuous painted sill band at first-floor level. The ground, first, and second floors all have 1/1 timber sliding sash windows, with the ground-floor bays aligned with those above. The basement window has been replaced with a 1/1 uPVC casement. Rainwater goods at the front consist of replacement uPVC ogee guttering on rise-and-fall brackets, terminating at a swan-neck cast iron circular downpipe to the left.

The entrance doorcase is a notable surviving historic feature: timber panelled pilasters on plinth blocks flank the opening, with plaster console brackets carrying acanthus leaf detail to either side of a recessed four-panel raised-and-fielded timber door. Above this sits a moulded timber cornice below a plain elliptical glazed fanlight.

The east and west elevations are party walls, joined to numbers 36 and 40 respectively.

The rear north elevation is also of smooth painted render, three storeys in height under the pitched slate roof, which has three Velux rooflights. A three-storey rear return is finished in smooth painted render to most elevations, with rough cast unpainted render to its north face; this return is built to half-landing height relative to the main house. Window openings to the rear elevation and return are square-headed on painted masonry sills, with an irregular fenestration pattern, and all windows here are replacement uPVC casements. A large smooth rendered unpainted chimney stack with two clay pots rises from the north elevation of the return.

To the rear of the return there is a modern single-storey extension with an artificial slate monopitch roof incorporating two Velux rooflights, a uPVC casement window, a timber door, and uPVC sliding patio doors. An internal courtyard lies between the rear wall of the main house and the back door of this single-storey extension. Beyond the extension is a large garden enclosed by schist and red brick boundary walls with timber gates. Upcycled uPVC ogee guttering on rise-and-fall brackets and cast iron circular downpipes serve the rear elevation and return.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

Great James Street was first laid out around 1833, with construction beginning by at least 1835–37, making it the first major new street in what had been open rural hinterland on the edge of the city. The 1830 first-edition Ordnance Survey map records the area — in the townland of Edenballymore — as essentially undeveloped, with the city's built fabric extending no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street, and William Street. The only significant buildings north of the walls at that time were isolated institutional structures such as the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum, and Foyle College. The sole building in the Clarendon Street Conservation Area to predate the early-Victorian development is Foyle Cottage, a Regency-style house of around 1815.

As Robert Simpson recorded in his 1847 Annals of Derry, the entire district around Great James Street had originally been meadow ground without a single house. Development of the area was driven by significant population and economic growth in Londonderry between 1825 and 1850, which, as historian John Hume notes, prompted reconstruction within the city walls alongside the first expansion of housing outside them at Bogside and Edenballymore. Great James Street was followed by Queen Street (laid out around 1847) and Clarendon Street (around 1853). Together, these three streets followed a geometric pattern characteristic of Georgian town planning — the most ambitious urban development in Londonderry since the original walled city was built in 1613–19. With their uniform rows of neat three-storey townhouses, they quickly became the favoured address of the city's merchant and professional classes.

Number 38 was constructed in 1871–72 alongside numbers 36 and 40. The row was first recorded in the Annual Revisions, which noted the plots were leased by George Skipton of Beechill House, a local landowner who held many of the plots on the north side of Great James Street. In the 1870s the house, valued at £25, was occupied by Moses Wiley, a local shopkeeper. The building appeared on the Annual Revisions Town Plan of around 1873–1910, already showing the three-storey rear return in its current form. By 1901 the house had passed to Mary Porter, and the census return for that year described it as a first-class dwelling of ten rooms. From 1907 it was occupied by Thomas McDowell, a butter and egg merchant, whose family continued to live there until at least the 1970s. The current owner purchased the house in 1982.

Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland, the rateable value was assessed at £32, rising to £35 by the end of the Second Revaluation. In 1978 the Department of the Environment designated the mid-19th-century streets and terraces as the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, defined as an area of special architectural or historic interest whose character it is desirable to preserve or enhance.