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

10 Victoria Crescent, Lisburn

A mid-terrace two-bay two-storey house with attic, built around 1880 in polychromatic brick. It forms part of a distinctive crescent of nineteen similar houses laid out across Wesley Street and Millbrook Road, converging at an unusual acute angle. Originally constructed as workers' housing for the nearby linen mills at Hilden, the house retains considerable late Victorian character despite the loss of its original windows.

The building is rectangular in plan, facing north, with a single-storey modern redbrick extension to the rear. The pitched roof is covered in natural slate with roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles. Two original shared polychromatic brick chimneystacks rise from the roof, accompanied by a gabled redbrick dormer. Plastic rainwater goods are fitted to a yellowbrick angled eaves course and frieze below.

The walling is redbrick laid in English garden wall bond with yellowbrick courses and a brick plinth course. The front elevation is two windows wide, featuring segmental-headed window openings with yellowbrick surrounds, black brick keystones, and painted sandstone sills. The original windows have been replaced with timber casement windows. A projecting arched yellowbrick door surround forms the focal point, decorated with a painted black brick keystone, impost mouldings, stop-chamfered pilasters, and brick plinth blocks. The door itself is a replacement timber panelled door with fanlight above. The left side elevation is abutted by adjoining house No. 12, while the right side is abutted by adjoining building No. 8. The rear elevation adjoins a single-storey modern extension and small enclosed yard.

The terrace first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of around 1900, suggesting construction around 1880. The design shows stylistic echoes of the neighbouring Methodist Church, which opened in 1876. This section of Lisburn was developed towards the end of the nineteenth century to provide low-cost housing for workers in the nearby linen mills, including Barbour's thread mill, Richardson's beetling mill, and the Island flax spinning mill. A Lisburn Standard advertisement from 1898 describes the area as "one of the best letting districts in the town, convenient to Messrs Barbour's Mills and other large public works."

The present terrace was of better quality than surrounding housing in the area. Local occupants state it was built by Barbour's as accommodation for bachelors and spinsters, though census records from the early twentieth century suggest this perception may not be entirely accurate. Census returns from 1901 and 1911 show that approximately half the terrace's inhabitants were employed in the linen industry, predominantly in linen thread production and therefore likely employees of Barbour's Thread Mill. Many other occupations are also represented, with larger houses around the curve of Wesley and Millbrook Streets often operated as boarding houses.

At the 1901 census, number 10 was occupied by John McClung, a millwright, living with his wife and their adult son, an invoice clerk in a linen yarn warehouse. The house comprised six rooms. By 1911, it had been taken over by Eliza Magee, a widow aged 68, who shared the house with her two sons—a print compositor and a painter—and two grandchildren. The house held group value with the other eighteen houses in the distinctive terrace and with the neighbouring Methodist Church and Manse to the north.