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

3 Victoria Crescent is a mid-terrace three-bay two-storey house with attic, built around 1880 in polychromatic brick. It forms part of a distinctive crescent of nineteen similar houses constructed for workers at the nearby linen mills at Hilden, laid out over two streets—Millbrook Road and Wesley Street—that converge at an unusual acute angle. The house is wedge-shaped on plan and faces west.

The building is constructed of red and yellow brick laid in English garden wall bond with a brick plinth course. It features a pitched and curved natural slate roof with roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles, two original polychromatic brick chimneystacks, and two gabled red brick dormers with exposed rafters. The front elevation is symmetrical and bow-fronted, five windows wide, with a pair of single-storey canted bays either side. The canted bays are built in yellow brick with angled brick cornices and roofs hidden behind brick parapets.

Window openings throughout are segmental-headed with yellow brick surrounds and black brick keystones, fitted with painted sandstone sills. The original windows have been replaced with hardwood examples, though the house retains much of its late Victorian character externally. The central doorway projects forward with an arched yellow brick surround, black brick keystone, impost mouldings, stop-chamfered pilasters and brick plinth blocks. It is fitted with a replacement hardwood glazed door and overlight. Yellow brick angled eaves course and frieze support plastic rainwater goods.

The left side elevation is abutted by the adjoining house No. 1, while the right side is abutted by No. 5. The rear elevation is concave curved, with replacement hardwood windows and a small rear yard.

Internally, the house retains its original stair, a significant survival. The house was designated first class according to its size and construction, comprising nine rooms.

The terrace first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of around 1900, dating from approximately 1880. The houses show stylistic echoes of the neighbouring Methodist Church, which opened in 1876. This part of Lisburn developed towards the end of the nineteenth century as low-cost housing for mill workers. Barbour's thread mill, Richardson's beetling mill and the Island flax spinning mill were all situated nearby. Contemporary newspaper advertising from the Lisburn Standard of 1898 described the area as "one of the best letting districts in the town, convenient to Messrs Barbour's Mills and other large public works". The terrace was of better quality than other surrounding housing, and residents report it was built by Barbour's as accommodation for bachelors and spinsters, though census records from the early twentieth century indicate that most occupants were families. Census returns from 1901 and 1911 show that approximately half the terrace inhabitants worked in the linen industry, predominantly in linen thread manufacture and therefore likely employed by Barbour's. Many other occupations are also represented, with larger houses around the Wesley and Millbrook Streets curve operating as boarding houses.

At the 1901 census, the house was occupied by Annie Johnston, widow of Thomas Johnston (a grocer's assistant who died in 1895), together with two boarders—a young Welsh journalist and a commercial clerk in the bleaching industry from County Londonderry. By 1911 it had been taken over by George McDowell, a linen thread manufacturers' clerk (most likely working for Barbour's), and his wife.

The house retains group value with the other eighteen houses in this distinctive terrace and with the Methodist Church and Manse to the north.