32-34 Toberwine Street, Glenarm, Ballymena, Counry Antrim, BT44 0AP

Two-storey terraced shop with apartment, built around 1870, situated on the east side of Toberwine Street in Glenarm, County Antrim. The property replaced a single-storey dwelling recorded in the valuation of 1859, and according to the current owner served for a time, probably in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as a temperance hotel. The building is not listed, though it lies within a conservation area. It is not considered to be of architectural interest.

The front elevation faces roughly west and is asymmetrical. At ground floor level there are two large plate glass picture windows interspersed with two glazed doors — a house door to the left and a shop door to the right — all of modern appearance. The first floor has three evenly spaced plain sash windows with bevelled reveals. The front façade is finished in painted roughcast with in-and-out quoins rising to first floor level. The gabled roof is slated to the front.

To the rear, the roof covering changes to asbestos tiles, and there are three Velux windows. On the right-hand side of the rear elevation is a single-storey flat-roofed extension of recent construction, with large modern-framed windows to its south and east faces. To the left-hand side of the rear elevation, a long single-storey shed projection extends outward under a mono-pitched corrugated asbestos roof. On the rear façade of the main building to the right of this shed, the ground floor has a modern-framed window and a recent glazed door. The first floor has two windows of varying size, both with modern frames, and between them, at half-landing level, a further modern-framed window. The rear elevation is finished in dry dash. There is a rendered chimney stack to the north. Rainwater goods are a combination of cast iron and PVC.

Toberwine Street — whose name translates as the Street of the Sweet Well — is thought to represent the original area of settlement within the village of Glenarm, its narrow character reflecting its antiquity. The original 13th-century castle of Glenarm, around which the village grew, is believed 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, his descendant Sir Randal McDonnell choosing instead to build a new residence on the other side of the river. Some historians suggest the old castle was occupied by tenants in some repaired form during the later 17th century, though Richard Dobbs makes no mention of it in his 1683 description of the village. The earliest reference to the name "Toberwine" in the Antrim Papers appears in a lease of November 1672, with "Toberwine Street" named explicitly in a lease of August 1709. John O'Hara's map of Glenarm dated 1779 — the earliest surviving plan of the village — shows the street fully developed on both sides, with the market and courthouse at its south-west end. No verifiable trace of the old castle appears on the map, but a remark in the 1835 Ordnance Survey Memoirs referring to "the foundations of a very extensive old castle which stood at the centre of the town until a few years ago" suggests some ruins may have survived into the early 19th century.

Evidence from the valuation of 1833 indicates that most buildings on the west side of Toberwine Street were already present in some form at that date and were probably 18th-century in origin. The east side of the street saw considerably more development after 1833, with nos. 4–12 dating from around 1840, and nos. 14, 20–34, and 62 post-dating around 1860 — some of these 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.