1-8 Shore Row

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Four pairs of semi-detached houses, formerly single-storey cottages with harled and whitened walls and slated with wide overhangs to eaves, with timber sliding sash windows but now almost entirely modernised in a variegated manner. Window patterns, wall finishes, and roof coverings have been changed, and a second storey has been added in one case so that they do not appear as a coherent group. Only one retains a semblance of its original appearance but it also has replacement cement render and replacement windows of a different form.

Setting: the houses stand on an elevated site in a rural location set back from the main road and overlooking it.

Historical information

Appears on OS map of 1857. Built in 1834 by John Irving, owner of the Magheramorne estate at that time, as labourers’ cottages, part of a scheme of 12 double cottages, the rest being located on Quinton Avenue. Described at the time as being “on a very improved and neat plan ... Each single cottage or rather the dwelling of each family, contains 3 roomy apartments, each lit by a spacious lattice window. Their floors are of earth. They are plastered and their roofs are rendered. They have good chimneys, and their general plan is such as to render them dry and warm. Their projecting eaves and pretty windows give them an exceedingly neat appearance.”

References - Primary Sources

1. OS Map 1857, Co Antrim 41.
2. Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland, Vol 26: Parishes of Co Antrim X (Belfast, 1995), pp 19 and 24.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

A group of late Georgian cottages which have been so altered as to retain none of their original exterior features and are no longer of any architectural interest