23 Island Kelly Park, Aghnahough, Lisburn, County Antrim

Pair of semi-detached rendered former local authority houses, built circa 1925, located on the east side of Island Kelly Park at Aghnahough, County Antrim. The buildings are square on plan, facing west, and now abandoned and vandalised.

The pair features a hipped natural slate roof with black clay ridge tiles and a central redbrick chimneystack with moulded cement coping and black clay pots. Cast-iron guttering on iron brackets is fitted to timber eaves, with cast-iron downpipes. The walls are rough-cast cement render over redbrick. Square-headed window openings have concrete sills, and the front two-bay elevation retains original 8/8 timber sash windows to each floor, though much glazing has been lost to vandalism.

The north and south side elevations each feature a single window opening to the first floor, with a projecting redbrick windbreaker entrance porch containing a moulded concrete hood and original sheeted and glazed timber door. The rear elevation is abutted by a pair of flat-roofed single-bay two-storey returns with timber casement windows and a further pair of timber sash windows to the first floor. The building sits within its own grounds, with a semi-detached flat-roofed redbrick services block to the rear yard.

These houses do not appear on the Ordnance Survey map until the fifth edition (1920–1931), depicted as one of three square-shaped structures constructed north of Lisburn during this period. The construction of such public housing was enabled by the Labourer's Acts, first passed in 1883, which allowed local authorities including Lisburn Rural District Council to construct over 50,000 cottages for landless labourers with state financial assistance. In Ulster, just under 10,000 such cottages were built or improved between 1891 and 1911, though construction continued after Partition. This pair exemplifies the type of simple, functional labourers' cottages typically constructed on the outskirts of major urban areas and villages. Currently the building is in severe disrepair, with broken windows throughout and the yard serving as a dumping ground for waste. Despite representing an increasingly rare example of early twentieth-century local authority housing, the extent of damage to building fabric has resulted in loss of historic character and the property does not meet the criteria for listing.