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

22 Victoria Crescent is a mid-terrace two-storey house with attic, built around 1880 in Lisburn, County Antrim. It is constructed of red and yellow brick in English garden wall bond, with a brick plinth course. The pitched roof is covered in natural slate with roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles and two original polychromatic brick chimneystacks. Plastic rainwater goods run along a yellow brick angled eaves course.

The front elevation faces north and is two windows wide. The windows are uPVC replacements set in segmental-headed openings with yellow brick surrounds, black brick keystones and painted red sandstone sills. The central doorway projects forward with an arched yellow brick surround featuring a painted black brick keystone, impost mouldings, stop-chamfered pilasters and brick plinth blocks. The door itself is uPVC with a fanlight above. Despite the loss of its original windows, the house retains much of its late Victorian character externally. The original stair survives internally. A two-storey modern rendered extension was added to the rear, with a small enclosed yard behind.

The house was built as part of a distinctive crescent of nineteen similar houses laid out over two streets—Wesley Street and Millbrook Road—which converge at an unusual acute angle. The terrace first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of around 1900, dating from approximately 1880. It shows stylistic echoes of the neighbouring Methodist Church, which opened in 1876.

The terrace was constructed during the late nineteenth-century development of this part of Lisburn, which comprised largely low-cost housing for workers in the nearby linen mills. Barbour's thread mill, Richardson's beetling mill and the Island flax spinning mill were all a short distance away. The 1898 Lisburn Standard advertised similar dwellings in the area as being in "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 rather better quality than other housing in the area, and current occupants report it was built by Barbour's as accommodation for bachelors and spinsters, though census returns from the early twentieth century show the majority of residents were actually families.

At the 1901 census, the house was occupied by Mary Higginson, a widow of 49, and her three children, all employed in the linen trade as a spreader, sorter and spooler. By 1911, the younger daughter had left, and Mary was living with her son, a flax dresser, and her daughter, who continued to work as a flax spreader. The house was classified as second class according to its size and construction, comprising six rooms. Census records show that about half the inhabitants of the terrace were employed in the linen industry, mostly in thread production, while many other occupations were also represented.

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