24 Toberwine Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AP

24 Toberwine Street is a large three-storey terraced building of around 1870, comprising two shops with recessed late Victorian shopfronts and two apartments above. It forms part of the east side of Toberwine Street in the village of Glenarm, with its symmetrical front façade facing roughly west. The building has been extensively altered and is not considered to be of special architectural interest. It was delisted on 23 January 2006 and sits within a conservation area. No.24 is the shop to the south side of the building.

The ground floor is set back behind a plain timber signboard with a plain projecting cornice. Beneath this are two virtually identical but handed shopfronts, each paired with an outer doorway giving access to the upper-floor apartment. To the far left is a four-panelled timber door — leading to the first-floor apartment at no.20 — with a tall plain fanlight with an elliptical head. To the left of this door is a narrow panelled pilaster jamb, and to the right a similar but much wider pilaster. Immediately to the right is the eight-pane shop door for no.22, also with an elliptical-headed fanlight. Its right-hand side is flanked by another narrow pilaster, in front of which stands a slender cast iron column. To the right of this is a plain rendered stall riser, above which is a large six-pane shop window with elliptical-headed upper panes. A relatively recent wrought iron chevaux de frise sits on the window sill. A plain projecting pier separates this shopfront from the mirrored arrangement to the right, which is identical in form but handed and has a panelled timber shop door.

The first and second floors are finished in painted render with in-and-out quoins, and are punctuated by four evenly spaced windows with bevelled reveals and sash frames with horizontal astragals in a two-over-two arrangement. There is a dentilled eaves course. The north and south gables rise above the two-storey neighbouring buildings on either side; both are blank, finished in painted render, and rise to a large rendered chimneystack.

To the rear, the ground floor is dominated by a massive modern single-storey extension with a flat roof that merges to the east with a shallow pitched gabled roof, obscuring most of the original rear elevation at ground level. Only the extreme left of the rear ground floor is visible, where there is a modern door; a further doorway may exist to the far right, but this section was obscured at the time of survey. The first and second floors of the rear elevation are symmetrical, with four windows on each floor — two to the far right and two to the far left. The outermost windows are taller and all have modern frames. The rear façade is finished in unpainted roughcast. The gabled roof is slated. Cast iron rainwater goods are present throughout.

Toberwine Street — whose name translates as "Street of the Sweet Well" — is believed to represent the original area of settlement within Glenarm, its narrowness suggesting considerable antiquity. The original 13th-century castle of Glenarm, around which the village developed, is thought to have stood at the south-west corner of the street, on the site now occupied by the former courthouse. The castle was deliberately destroyed by Sorley Boy MacDonnell in 1597 and apparently not repaired, with Sorley's descendant Sir Randal McDonnell subsequently building a new residence on the opposite side of the river. Some historians record that the old castle was occupied by tenants — and therefore presumably repaired in some fashion — in the later 17th century, though Richard Dobbs makes no mention of it in his 1683 description of the village. The earliest reference to "Toberwine" in the Antrim Papers appears in a lease of November 1672, which refers to a house within the area; the name "Toberwine Street" appears in a lease of August 1709. On John O'Hara's 1779 map of Glenarm — the earliest surviving plan of the village — the street is shown fully developed on both sides, with a market and courthouse at its south-western end. No verifiable evidence of the old castle's remains appears on the map, though the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs note "the foundations of a very extensive old castle which stood at the centre of the town until a few years ago", suggesting some ruins persisted into the early 19th century.

The valuation of 1833 indicates that most buildings now visible on the west side of the street were present in some form at that date and were probably of 18th-century origin. The east side saw considerably more development after 1833: nos.4–12 date from around 1840, and nos.20–34 and no.62 were built after around 1860, some replacing modest single-storey dwellings. The large three-storey former Antrim Arms Hotel, and possibly its neighbour no.56, may have been standing in the early 1830s, though this is not certain.

Annotations to the valuation plan of 1859 confirm that the building containing nos.20–26 was constructed after that date, with its design suggesting a date of around the 1870s. The Ordnance Survey town plan of 1903 shows that the building already had a rear return at that date, but the present return is a late 20th-century replacement, probably dating from around the 1980s. In the early 1900s — and possibly earlier — no.24 served as Glenarm's post office.