16-18 Altmore Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AR

Plain two-storey terraced house, stuccoed, dating from around 1835 to 1840, situated on the east side of Altmore Street in Glenarm. Numbers 16 and 18 were formerly two separate properties but have since been amalgamated into a single dwelling. Sufficient original character survives both inside and outside to justify its listed status.

The asymmetrical front façade faces west and is finished in lined render with bevelled in-and-out quoins and a bevelled base course. At ground floor level, slightly left of centre, is a panelled timber front door with a five-pane fanlight above it. To its left is a plain sash window, and to its right is a further similar window. At first floor level there are three similar sash windows positioned directly above the three ground floor openings. To the rear elevation, slightly right of centre, is a partly glazed door. To either side of this door at ground floor level is a single window with a modern frame; the window to the left appears to have been enlarged in recent times. At first floor level to the rear there are three small windows, also with modern frames, set at marginally differing heights from one another. The gabled roof is covered with natural slate and has two cast-iron skylights to the rear, the one on the right-hand south side being considerably larger than the other. To the rear garden there is a stone-built outbuilding with a corrugated-iron flat roof. Marks to the render suggest that the southern portion of the building was at some stage used as a small shop.

Altmore Street takes its name from the Altmore River, a narrow brook flowing from the high ground to the south-east down to the Glenarm River to the west. The earliest recorded reference to building plots in the vicinity dates from a lease of August 1673, which mentions a "housestead, garden of tenement extending back to Altmore Brook," with further references from December 1678 to "tenements" on the "south side of Altmore" and to a "street" in that location. Many of the earliest houses within the street may have been built on its western side, since before the walling in of the Glenarm Castle estate grounds in the 1750s the village fronted onto both sides of the Glenarm River. Some buildings on the western side may originally have faced the river rather than the street: the present number 15, for instance, appears to have originally had an almost symmetrical rear elevation facing the river and a markedly asymmetrical front elevation facing the street, while number 29 has a date stone of 1739 on its river-facing side rather than its street-facing front.

The earliest surviving map of Glenarm, drawn by John O'Hara in 1779, shows the street fully developed on both sides, with the terrace to the west extending further south than it does today, beyond the line of the present Town Gate to the Glenarm Castle estate. The construction of the Town Gate, which took place sometime between 1832 and 1857, appears to have brought about radical changes to the layout of the street, with much of the terrace on the eastern side pushed further eastwards to allow for a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No published account of the development of Glenarm appears to record this widening of the street, but the discrepancy between the alignment of much of the eastern terrace as shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1832 and that of 1857 suggests that it did indeed occur. This theory is further supported by an 1830 illustration of the town by T.M. Baynes, published in Ireland Illustrated in 1831, which shows the two sections of terrace on the eastern side out of alignment and most of the houses on that side as single-storey at that date. Additionally, many of the buildings recorded in the 1833 valuation of this side of the street appear to bear no relation to those recorded in the valuation of 1859, as though all had been demolished and rebuilt. The age and condition grading of properties used in the 1859 valuation indicates that most of the rebuilt dwellings were around twenty years old or slightly more at that date, placing much of the redevelopment in the mid to later 1830s. This is consistent with a remark in the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of 1835 that "some two storey houses of a tolerable description have been recently built in Glenarm, intended for the accommodation of lodgers during the bathing season." The western side of Altmore Street may have remained largely untouched by these mid-19th-century changes, with some buildings there possibly pre-dating the 1830s, though certain properties at the very southern end were cleared to make way for the Town Gate and incorporated into the estate.

Numbers 16 to 18 are almost certainly the building of matching dimensions recorded in the 1859 valuation, which the valuers indicate was just over twenty years old at that date. The leaseholder and occupant in 1859 was one William Lowery, and the house was noted as containing eight small rooms and a garret. At some point, probably in the late 19th or early 20th century, the building was divided into two separate properties, which accounts for the dual street numbering of 16 and 18. The two have since been reunited as a single dwelling.