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

20 Toberwine Street is a large three-storey terraced building dating from around 1865 to 1870, situated on the east side of Toberwine Street in the village of Glenarm. It comprises two shops at ground floor level with two apartments above, and forms part of a group of properties on this side of the street that were developed after around 1860, some replacing earlier modest single-storey dwellings. The building has been extensively altered and is not of special architectural interest. It was delisted in January 2006, though it remains within a conservation area.

The front façade faces roughly west, is symmetrical in composition, and is finished in painted render with in-out quoins at the corners. At ground floor level, both shop fronts and the apartment entrance doors are recessed behind a plain timber signboard carried on a plain projecting cornice. To the far left is a four-panelled timber door — the entrance to No. 20, a first-floor apartment — with a tall plain fanlight with an elliptical head. To its left is a narrow panelled pilaster jamb; to its right is a similar but much wider pilaster. Immediately to the right of this is the eight-pane shop door for No. 22, also with an elliptical-headed fanlight. A narrow pilaster flanks the right side of this door, in front of which stands a slender cast-iron column. To the right of the column is a plain rendered stall riser, above which sits a large six-pane shop window with elliptical-headed upper panes. A relatively recent-looking wrought-iron chevaux de frise sits on the window sill. A plain projecting pier separates this shop from the one to the right, which is a handed repetition of the left-hand shop front but has a panelled timber shop door. At first- and second-floor level there are four evenly spaced windows with bevelled reveals and sash frames with horizontal astragals in a two-over-two arrangement. The eaves are finished with a dentilled course. Both 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. This extension obscures almost the entire ground floor of the rear elevation, with only the extreme left portion visible, where there is a modern door; there may be a further doorway to the far right, though this section was obscured from view at the time of survey. The first and second floors of the rear elevation are symmetrical, each having four windows — two to the far right and two to the far left — with the outermost windows being taller. All rear windows have modern frames. The rear elevation is finished in unpainted roughcast. The gabled roof is slated, and cast-iron rainwater goods are fitted throughout.

The Ordnance Survey town plan of 1903 records that the building already had a return at that date, but the present return — which is very large — is a late 20th-century replacement, probably dating from the 1980s or 1990s. Annotations to the valuation plan of 1859 confirm that the building was constructed after that date, and its design is consistent with a date of around the 1870s. In the early 1900s, and possibly earlier, No. 24 within this block served as Glenarm's post office.

Toberwine Street — whose name derives from the Irish for "street of the sweet well" — is believed to represent the earliest area of settlement within Glenarm. Its narrowness hints at its 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 demolished by Sorley Boy MacDonnell in 1597 and apparently not repaired, with his descendant Sir Randal McDonnell building a new residence on the other side of the river. Some historians suggest the old castle was occupied by tenants in the later 17th century, implying some form of repair, but Richard Dobbs makes no mention of it in his 1683 description of the village. The name "Toberwine" appears in the Antrim Papers as early as a lease of November 1672, referring to a house in the area, with "Toberwine Street" named explicitly in a lease of August 1709. By the time of John O'Hara's 1779 map of Glenarm — the earliest surviving plan of the village — the street is shown as fully developed on both sides, with the market and courthouse at the south-west end. No verifiable trace of the old castle is shown on that map, but the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs record "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 already present in some form by that date, many likely of 18th-century origin. The east side of the street saw considerably more development after 1833, with Nos. 4 to 12 dating from around 1840, and Nos. 20 to 34 and No. 62 all post-dating around 1860.