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

4 Victoria Crescent, Lisburn

Mid-terrace two-storey house with attic, built around 1880, constructed of polychromatic brick in English garden wall bond with a pitched natural slate roof. The building retains much of its late Victorian character despite the loss of its original windows.

The house is one of nineteen similar dwellings laid out as a distinctive crescent running from Millbrook Road to Wesley Street, converging at an unusual acute angle. It was built to accommodate workers at the nearby linen mills at Hilden, including Barbour's thread mill, Richardson's beetling mill, and the Island flax spinning mill. The terrace first appears on the Ordnance Survey map around 1900 and shows stylistic echoes of the neighbouring Methodist Church, which opened in 1876.

The house is rectangular on plan, facing north, measuring two bays wide. The roof features two original shared polychromatic brick chimneys and a gabled red brick dormer with roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles. Plastic rainwater goods run from a yellow brick angled eaves course and frieze.

The front elevation is two windows wide. Window openings are segmental-headed with yellow brick surrounds, black brick keystones, and painted sandstone sills, though the windows themselves are now replacement timber casements with one ground floor uPVC window. The central doorway projects forward with an arched yellow brick surround, black brick keystone, impost mouldings, stop-chamfered pilasters, brick plinth blocks, and a replacement hardwood panelled door with fanlight above.

At the rear, a single-storey flat-roofed red brick extension has been added with uPVC windows and a small yard beyond. Left and right elevations are abutted by adjoining properties.

The terrace represents a relatively good quality of worker housing for its time. Census records from 1901 and 1911 show residents employed in various occupations, though approximately half worked in the linen industry. At the 1901 census, the house was occupied by Mary Kerr, a widow, with her three adult sons (two clerks in the linen trade and one painter) and her brother-in-law, a bleacher. By 1911 the sons had left and only Mary and her brother-in-law remained. The house was classified as second-class according to size and construction, comprising seven rooms.

The building has group value with the other eighteen houses in the crescent and with the neighbouring Methodist Church and Manse to the north.