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

35 Fountain Street is a mid-terrace, two-storey, two-bay Victorian townhouse built in 1883 as part of a uniform row of fourteen similar houses lining the north-west side of Fountain Street, Londonderry. The building is recorded as derelict, and at the time of survey only the front elevation and parts of the party walls remained standing. It falls within the Historic City Conservation Area and carries group value alongside Nos. 9–33 Fountain Street, though insufficient historic fabric survives for it to merit listed status in its own right.

ARCHITECTURE

The building is rectangular on plan. Its principal south-east elevation faces onto Fountain Street and is set hard to the back of the pavement. It is constructed in red brick laid in English Garden Wall bond, with decorative Victorian brickwork dressings in contrasting black brick throughout. The roofline features an ornamental projecting brick cornice at eaves level with a double band of black brick immediately below. Continuous decorative brick stringcourses in contrasting black run at both ground- and first-floor levels, positioned at sill and head heights, with a further row of black brick separated by three courses of red above sill level and below head level on each floor.

The ground floor has a single segmental arch-headed window opening and a segmental arch-headed entrance door opening set one step up from the pavement. The first floor has two segmental arch-headed window openings. All openings have red brick voussoirs to their heads, with three black bricks at the centre forming a keystone detail. All sills have a painted finish. At the time of survey all window and door openings were boarded, with graphic panels depicting a six-panel door and windows applied in their place.

The front elevation had been partially stabilised by the addition of steel bracing, and masonry above the door opening had been replaced. The rear of the dwelling is demolished. The north-east and south-west sides are abutted by the adjoining properties Nos. 33 and 29 Fountain Street. The north-west boundary of the yard backs directly onto the historic city walls.

The original roof covering would have been natural slate, though no roof survives. No rainwater goods remain.

SETTING AND CONTEXT

Fountain Street runs just outside and immediately alongside the historic city walls, between New Gate and Ferry Quay Gate, to the east of St Columb's Cathedral. The surviving portion of the terrace — Nos. 11–35 — faces former industrial buildings on the opposite side of the street, most notably the site of the Welch Margetson Shirt Factory. The terrace represents one of only a small number of groups to have survived the large-scale demolition and redevelopment of the surrounding Fountain area that took place in the 1970s, which swept away Fountain Street beyond Hawkin Street together with 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.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Fountain Street is among the earliest streets to have been developed outside Londonderry's walled city. Historical sources indicate that houses on this site were depicted on maps as early as 1685, with the suggestion that the street may have been settled almost immediately after the walls were built — though initially only on the side of the street away from the walls, which would have been kept clear for defensive purposes. The street had acquired the 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 annual revision maps of c.1873–1910 show that Fountain Street originally extended from Ferryquay Street around the city walls before terminating at Bishop Street. The revision maps indicate that the previous terrace, situated between Ferryquay Street and Hawkin Street, comprised a number of irregularly sized buildings leased by Hamilton Graham, a local bookkeeper who resided on the Northland Road and who died in 1892. This earlier row was demolished and replaced with the present uniform two-storey, two-bay terrace in 1883.

The terrace continued to be leased by Hamilton Graham and was occupied by working-class labourers, the majority of whom were employed in the neighbouring factories and local industries. No. 11 Fountain Street — a comparable house within the same terrace — was valued at £8 following completion, and its first recorded occupant was James McGonigle, a bank messenger whose wife and daughter worked as machinists in a local factory. The 1901 census described No. 11 as a second-class dwelling containing six rooms with a coal house as its sole outbuilding. Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57) the value was raised to £12, and the property had been purchased by the Convent of the Sisters of Mercy on Pump Street by 1945. Under the Second Revaluation (1956–72) the value was further increased to £15 and 10 shillings.

The terrace was included in the Historic City Conservation Area in 2006. The Conservation Area Design Guide described the Fountain Street terrace as displaying "the Victorian taste for polychrome brickwork derived from the Venetian Gothic." Architectural historian D. Calley characterised the row as a "stepped terrace of two-storey, two-bay houses of red-brick with black brick string-courses and keystones" with "segmental-headed openings and bold, decorative brick roof cornices." The 1970 Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide to Londonderry described the character of the area in the following 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 as a whole is a surviving remnant of the once-prevalent industrial working-class character of the Fountain area, which supplied workers to Londonderry's shirt-making and shipbuilding industries during the city's prosperous late-Victorian period.