5 Victoria Crescent, Lisburn, County Antrim, BT27 4TG

5 Victoria Crescent, Lisburn

A mid-terrace two-storey house with attic, built around 1880 as part of a distinctive nineteen-house crescent laid out across Wesley Street and Millbrook Road in Lisburn, County Antrim. The terrace was constructed to house workers employed at the nearby linen mills, including Barbour's thread mill, Richardson's beetling mill, and the Island flax spinning mill. The houses show stylistic echoes of the neighbouring Methodist Church, which opened in 1876, and the terrace itself first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of around 1900.

The building is rectangular on plan, facing southwest, with a modern single-storey extension added to the rear. The roof is pitched with natural slate tiles and roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles. Two original shared polychromatic brick chimneystacks rise from the roof, and a gabled dormer with slate roof and timber bargeboard punctuates the roofline. The walls are constructed of redbrick laid in English garden wall bond with yellowbrick courses and a brick plinth course. Below the yellowbrick angled eaves course and frieze, plastic rainwater goods have been installed.

The front elevation is two windows wide, stepped up from the adjoining house to the south (No. 7) and stepped down from the adjoining house to the north (No. 3). Segmental-headed window openings with yellowbrick surrounds, black brick keystones, and painted sandstone sills contain uPVC windows—replacements that represent a loss of original fenestration. A projecting arched yellowbrick door surround with black brick keystone, impost mouldings, stop-chamfered pilasters, and brick plinth blocks frames a uPVC replacement door. The left side elevation is abutted by the adjoining house No. 3, the right side by No. 7, and the rear elevation by the single-storey redbrick extension.

The terrace was of rather better quality than other housing in the surrounding area. Contemporary sources from the Lisburn Standard of 1898 described the district as "one of the best letting districts in the town, convenient to Messrs Barbour's Mills and other large public works". Occupants have stated the houses were built by Barbour's as accommodation for bachelors and spinsters, though census records from the early twentieth century indicate this interpretation may not reflect the actual pattern of occupation.

Census returns reveal the social and economic character of the house. In 1901, the house was occupied by William Bowden, a carter, his wife, and three adult children, including a thread work master and two daughters employed in the textile trades. By 1911, it had become home to the Kingsberry family—a widow from County Tyrone with an extended household of eleven adults and one child occupying seven rooms designated as second class. Five of the Kingsberry daughters worked in the linen thread trade, mostly as spinners, while other household members included a general labourer, two female boarders employed as drawers of linen thread, and two nieces, one of whom worked as a spinner. Despite the loss of its original windows and door, the house retains much of its late Victorian character externally and has group value with the other houses in this distinctive crescent and with the neighbouring Methodist Church and Manse to the north.