44 Great James Street, Londonderry, County Londonderry, BT48 7DA

44 Great James Street is a Victorian mid-terrace house built in a Georgian style, constructed between 1853 and 1856. It forms part of a terraced row alongside Nos 42 and 46 Great James Street, lining the north side of Great James Street within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area in Londonderry, parallel to Clarendon Street and on the west side of the River Foyle. The building is not considered one of the best examples of its type and does not meet the statutory test as a building of special architectural or historic interest, but it is recognised as a significant feature within the conservation area, which provides the more appropriate level of protection. Its former use was as a terraced house; it is currently in use as a hotel.

The building is two bays wide and three storeys tall, rectangular on plan, with a pitched slate roof finished with clay ridge tiles and a rebuilt red brick chimney stack with two terracotta clay pots rising from the east side. The walls are smooth rendered and painted throughout.

The principal elevation faces south and is accessed directly from street level, one step up. The rendered walls are dressed with smooth plaster band quoins to the west side from the doorcase upwards. Window openings are square-headed, set on painted masonry sills, and glazed with 6/6 timber sliding sash windows to the ground, first, and diminished second floor. Notably, the bays on the ground floor are not aligned with the window bays on the floors above. The entrance doorway has an elliptical arch head, is slightly recessed, and is flanked by flat pilasters on plinth blocks. The door itself is a raised-and-fielded four-panel painted timber door with a dentilled entablature and a plain fanlight above, set one step up from the pavement. Aluminium ogee guttering is fixed to a timber barge board, terminating at a swan neck cast iron circular downpipe to the left. The north elevation was not seen at the time of survey. The east and west sides are adjoined to the neighbouring properties at Nos 42 and 46 Great James Street respectively.

Materials are as follows: slate roof with cast iron and aluminium rainwater goods, rendered walls, and timber sliding sash windows.

Great James Street was originally laid out around 1833, with the earliest buildings constructed along it by at least 1835 to 1837, when Londonderry Third Presbyterian Church was erected. The street's development, along with that of the adjoining Queen Street and Clarendon Street, was driven by a period of economic growth and population expansion in Londonderry during the mid-19th century. As historian John Hume has noted, during the period 1825 to 1850 reconstruction within the city walls took place alongside the first development of housing outside the walls at Bogside and Edenballymore. Great James Street was the first major new street in the area; Queen Street followed around 1847 and Clarendon Street around 1853.

The first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1830 records that the Great James Street area was originally rural hinterland with few significant structures, and in that year the city's developed streets extended no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street, and William Street. In the early 19th century the only major construction north of the walls had been isolated institutional buildings — the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum, and Foyle College — with little or no domestic architecture erected in the same period. The only building in the Clarendon Street Conservation Area that predates the early Victorian development is Foyle Cottage, a Regency-style house constructed around 1815. Robert Simpson, in his Annals of Derry (1847), recorded that the entire district originally comprised meadow ground without a house. The initial development of housing in this area began in the late Georgian period and continued into the Victorian era, with uniform rows of neat three-storey townhouses establishing a new affluent quarter that 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 street development, and the project represented the most ambitious town planning undertaken in Londonderry since the construction of the walled city between 1613 and 1619.

No. 44 specifically was not depicted on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1853 but had been completed by 1856, when it was recorded in Griffith's Valuation alongside the adjoining Nos 42 and 46. At that time the valuer noted that the house was leased by Edward Collum, a butter and egg merchant with business premises on Bank Place, to Stewart Christie, a local merchant. The house was initially valued at £28 and continued to be occupied by McKee until around 1864, when it passed to a Mr George Hewitson. The property was recorded on the annual revision map of around 1873 to 1910, which depicted it in its current layout with a two-storey return and a single-storey outbuilding. In 1881 ownership passed to a Ms Mary McMonagle. The Hewitson family remained at No. 44 until the 1890s, and by 1911 the Census of Ireland recorded Margaretta Kerr, a local dressmaker, as occupant. The census building return described No. 44 as a second-class dwelling consisting of seven rooms. Under the First General Revaluation of property in Northern Ireland, covering 1936 to 1957, the rateable value was decreased to £27. Around 1956 the building was purchased outright by Dr D. McDermott, who partially converted it into a surgery. By the end of the Second Revaluation, covering 1956 to 1972, the total rateable value had risen to £56. In 1978 the Department of the Environment designated the mid-19th-century streets and terraces of Great James Street, Queen Street, and Clarendon Street a Conservation Area, described as an area of special architectural or historic interest, the character of which it is desirable to preserve or enhance. At the time of the second survey, No. 44 was in use as a hostel.

The building sits within a varied terrace row of houses lining the north side of Great James Street, within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area.