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

22 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 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 formerly listed but was delisted on 23 January 2006, though it remains within a conservation area.

The ground floor is dominated by two virtually identical but mirrored shopfronts, both set back beneath a plain timber signboard with a plain projecting cornice. To the far left is a four-panelled timber door — serving the upper-floor apartment at No. 20 — with a tall plain fanlight with an elliptical head. To its left is a narrow panelled pilaster jamb, and to its right a similar but much wider pilaster. Immediately to the right of this is the eight-pane shop door for No. 22, with a matching elliptical fanlight. A narrow pilaster flanks the right side of this door, and in front of it stands a slender cast iron column. To the right of the column 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 divides this shopfront from the second, which mirrors it but is handed and has a panelled timber shop door.

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

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 rear elevation at ground level. Only the extreme left side remains visible at this level, where there is a modern door; another doorway may exist to the far right but was obscured from view at the time of survey. The first and second floors of the rear are symmetrical, each having four windows — two to the far left and two to the far right — with the outermost windows being taller and all fitted with modern frames. The rear façade is finished in unpainted roughcast render. The gabled roof is slated. Cast iron rainwater goods are fitted throughout.

Toberwine Street — whose name translates as "Street of the Sweet Well" — is believed to represent the original area of settlement in Glenarm, its narrow character hinting at its antiquity. The original 13th-century castle of Glenarm, around which the village grew, 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 later occupied by tenants in the later 17th century and therefore repaired to some degree, but 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, referring to a house in the area, with "Toberwine Street" itself named 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 was shown as fully developed on both sides, with a market or courthouse at the south-west end. No verifiable trace of the old castle appears on the map, though 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 that some ruins persisted into the early 19th century.

Evidence from the 1833 valuation indicates that most buildings now visible on the west side of Toberwine Street were present in some form at that date, and many are likely to be 18th-century in origin. The east side saw considerably more development after 1833: Nos. 4–12 date from around 1840, while Nos. 20–34 and 62 are all post-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 1859 valuation plan confirm that this building — covering 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.