16 Clarendon Street, Londonderry, County Londonderry, BT48 7ET

16 Clarendon Street is an early Victorian mid-terrace townhouse of two bays and three storeys with an attic, built in red brick in the Georgian style and constructed before 1856. It sits on the north side of Clarendon Street in the Edenballymore townland of Derry, within the Clarendon Street Conservation Area, and retains its original character and much of its original detailing. It shares group value with numbers 6 to 14 and 18 to 48 Clarendon Street, a row of similar townhouses built over an eight-year period lining the same side of the street.

The building is rectangular on plan with a large single-storey rear return. The principal elevation faces south onto Clarendon Street and is set behind a low rendered wall topped with replacement cast iron railings enclosing a small hard-surfaced area. The roof is pitched slate with black clay ridge tiles to both the main roof and the return, one rooflight to the front, and a slender red brick chimney stack — rebuilt — rising from the east side and centred on the ridge with clay pots. Cast-iron half-round guttering is carried on rise-and-fall brackets to the front.

The principal south elevation is laid in Flemish bond brick. Window openings have cut brick flat arches with six-over-six timber sliding sash windows set within painted cement-rendered reveals and painted sills. To the left of the front elevation is a three-centred arched entrance doorway with a moulded surround, a moulded entablature supported by a pair of Doric columns, a simple radial fanlight, and a four-panelled timber door. Two windows of reduced scale sit to the right of the door at ground floor level. The first and second floors each have two windows, though these are not aligned with the ground floor openings. The east and west elevations are abutted by the adjoining properties at numbers 14 and 18 Clarendon Street respectively.

The rear north elevation is three storeys with an attic dormer to the left. A full-width modern single-storey lean-to extension runs across the rear, abutted by further modern additions, with a small yard beyond. To the exposed section of the main rear elevation, windows are square-headed: six-over-six sliding sash windows at the main floor levels and six-over-three timber sliding sash windows at the half-landing levels. The majority of the rear yard has been developed, leaving only a small yard to the far north with a laneway beyond providing access to the rest of the terrace.

The house was one of the earliest to be built on Clarendon Street, constructed as part of an original terrace of five three-storey buildings alongside numbers 12 to 20. It was first recorded in Griffith's Valuation in 1856, at which point the entire group was leased by the Reverend Henry Wallace, Moderator of the Presbyterian Synod of Ulster in 1839, and number 16 was individually valued at £25. Despite Wallace's death in 1887, numbers 12 to 16 continued to be owned by his personal estate through the Annual Revisions. The 1901 census recorded the house as a first-class building of ten inhabited rooms.

The occupants throughout its history were drawn from the city's merchant and professional classes. In 1856 the house was the residence of the Reverend Robert Sewell of the Congregational Church on Great James Street. From 1885 until the 1930s it was occupied by James Thompson, a local publican whose business, James Thompson and Son, was based in Waterloo Place. The rateable value was reduced to £23 in 1913 and remained there until the cancellation of the Annual Revisions in 1931. Between 1931 and 1935 the entire row of numbers 6 to 26 was purchased outright by a Miss Jennie Steen, and the house continued in private residential use through the 1970s. Under the Second General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland its value was assessed at £35.

Clarendon Street was designated a Conservation Area by the Department of the Environment in 1978 as an area of special architectural or historic interest whose character it is desirable to preserve or enhance, and number 16 was listed in 1979. By the 1980s the building had been converted into office space for the Samaritans. Repair work carried out in 1985 included the rebuilding of one chimney stack, re-slating of the roof, repointing of the external brickwork, and replacement of defective timbers. The current single-storey rear extension was added in 1992 to provide additional office floor space, and in 2006 the windows to the front and rear were repaired. At the time of the second survey the building remained in use as offices for the Samaritans.

The broader historical context of the street is significant. The Clarendon Street area was rural hinterland as late as 1830, when the first edition Ordnance Survey map recorded few significant structures and urban development extended no further than Waterloo Place, Abbey Street and William Street. The only major construction north of the walls in the early 19th century had been isolated institutional buildings: the Londonderry Infirmary, the Lunatic Asylum, and Foyle College. The sole domestic building predating the early Victorian development is Foyle Cottage, a Regency house of around 1815. Robert Simpson, writing in his Annals of Derry published in 1847, noted that all the district covered by Great James Street, William Street and the surrounding lanes had originally comprised meadow ground without a house. John Hume records that between 1825 and 1850 reconstruction within the walls took place alongside the first development of housing outside them at Bogside and Edenballymore.

The laying out of Clarendon Street, Great James Street and Queen Street followed a geometric street pattern characteristic of Georgian town planning and represented the most ambitious exercise in urban development in Londonderry since the construction of the walled city between 1613 and 1619. A plan of Londonderry dated 1847 showed the final intended layout of Clarendon Street at least a decade before it was completed, and recorded that it was originally called Ponsonby Street, named after the Right Reverend Richard Ponsonby (1772–1853), Bishop of Derry and Raphoe. By the 1850s it had been renamed Clarendon Street in honour of George Villiers (1800–1870), the Fourth Earl of Clarendon and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1847 to 1852. The second edition Ordnance Survey map confirms the name had changed to Clarendon Street by at least 1853.

Although the 1847 plan showed Clarendon Street extending from the quay up to Francis Street, only the lower section between the Strand Road and Queen Street had been laid out by 1853. Development progressed slowly through the 1850s. In 1851 Skipton and Miller had advertised building ground on Clarendon Street, Queen Street and Patrick Street to let in perpetuity, and Griffith's Valuation recorded just nine dwellings along the entire length of the street by 1856, the year in which additional leases for building ground on the northern side were advertised. In 2013, the architectural historian Calley described numbers 6 to 48 as a "delightfully long red brick terrace of the mid-19th century," noting that the buildings are nearly all the same — three-and-a-half storeys, two bays — with most ground floors "rather inelegantly squeezing in a doorway with two reduced scale window bays," and characterising the doorways as having "depressed arched recessed timber-framed doorways with simple segmented fanlights and thin Doric columns supporting entablatures."