10a Altmore Street, Former Baptist Church, Glenarm, Ballymena, Co Antrim, BT44 0AR

This is a plain, two-storey terraced house dating from around 1835–40, situated on the east side of Altmore Street in Glenarm. It was formerly used as a shop and, in more recent decades (approximately the 1970s and 1980s), served as a Baptist church. It is now in use as a recreational club. The building lies within a conservation area but is not listed, having been delisted in October 2005, and is not considered to be of special architectural or historical interest.

The west-facing front façade is asymmetrical. On the ground floor to the right is a shop front, its door formed in panelled timber with a rectangular fanlight featuring semicircular arched tracery; to the right of the door is a shop window with double semicircular tracery forming two arch-headed lights. To the left of the ground floor is a coach arch with a flat arch head and curved ends. On the first floor are two sash windows with Georgian panes in a 6/6 arrangement. The ground floor walls are finished in painted lined render, while the first floor is finished in dry dash.

To the rear is a long two-storey return on the left south side, which appears to have a mono-pitched roof, at least at its east end. The east face of the return is blank. The south face opens into the adjoining property and is also blank. The north face has a door to the left on the ground floor and four modern windows to the right, with four similar windows on the first floor above. On the right side of the rear elevation of the main building there is a sash window matching those on the front, and directly below it is the rear of the coach arch. The entire rear elevation, including much of the return, is finished in painted rough render. The gabled roof is slated and has two shared rendered chimneystacks. Cast iron rainwater goods are fitted throughout. To the rear is an enclosed yard; the yards to the rear of nos. 8, 10 and 10a are linked and are all accessed via the coach arch to this property.

The property is probably the same building recorded in the 1859 valuation, in which the valuers implied it was built in the mid 1830s, consistent with the wider redevelopment of the east side of Altmore Street at that time. In 1859 the building appears to have been in the hands of Archy McNeill, who also owned the larger neighbouring property to the north. The rear return has been somewhat modernised in recent years.

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 reference to building plots in its vicinity appears in a lease of August 1673 mentioning a "housestead, garden of tenement…extending back to Altmore Brook", with further leases of December 1678 referring to tenements on the "south side of Altmore" and to the existence of a "street". Many of the earliest houses may have been built on the western side of the street, since prior to the walling in of the Glenarm Castle estate grounds in the 1750s the village fronted both sides of the Glenarm River. Some buildings on the western side may originally have faced the river rather than the street: the present no. 15, for instance, appears originally to have had an almost symmetrical rear elevation facing the river and a markedly asymmetrical front elevation facing the street, while no. 29 has a date stone of 1739 on its river-facing side.

The earliest surviving map of Glenarm, drawn by John O'Hara in 1779, shows the street fully developed on both sides, with the western terrace then extending further south than today, beyond the line of the present Town Gate to the Glenarm Castle estate. The construction of the Town Gate — at some point between 1832 and 1857 — appears to have brought about radical changes to the layout of the street, with much of the eastern terrace pushed further eastward to allow a broader and slightly grander approach to the estate. No written account of this widening has been found, but the discrepancy between the alignment of the eastern terrace as shown on the Ordnance Survey map of 1832 and that of 1857 suggests it did take place. This interpretation is supported by an 1830 illustration of the town by T. M. Baynes, published in Ireland Illustrated (London, 1831), which shows the two sections of the eastern terrace out of alignment and suggests most houses on that side were single storey at that date. Furthermore, many of the buildings recorded in the 1833 valuation of the eastern side of the street appear to bear no relation to those recorded in the 1859 valuation, as though all had been demolished and replaced. The age and condition gradings applied in the 1859 valuation indicate 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 unaffected by these mid-19th-century changes, with some buildings possibly predating the 1830s, though properties at the very southern end were cleared for the construction of the Town Gate and the land incorporated into the estate.