9 Wellington Park Terrace

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

No 9 forms part of a terrace of six (No.’s 5 to 15) Mid Victorian two storey dwellings with dormered roofs.

The terrace looks out onto a semi communal gardens. Some houses have access out onto the entry at the rear of the North side of Eglantine Avenue but for all houses the principal pedestrian access is by way of a shared path that runs parallel to the front of the terrace. For some houses this is the only access to the front door. The large semi communal nature of the green space, uninterrupted by driveways or paths, gives a unique character to the
setting of the terrace.

The front/principal elevation is of fair faced brick construction laid in a Flemish bond and using a red brick with color variations which give an attractive brindled appearance. The end houses have quoins (lost on No15) and the “central” house No 11 also has quoins to form a (slightly skewed) unified composition to the terrace front.

The front entrance to No 9 has a stucco surround with narrow pilasters on each side of the door rising to large console brackets which support a molded projecting cornice. An undecorated frieze links the brackets under the cornice and forms the entrance lintol. Above the cornice a curious flat plaster pediment (unpainted) completes the entrance surround. The front door is a replacement with two lower panels and a glazed 12 pane upper part with an integral “fanlight”. Above the door is a simple rectangular fanlight.

The ground floor front window has a molded stucco surround and a three centered shallow arched top. The fenestration is a sliding sash horizontally divided into two over two with vertical margin panes.
The first floor window openings are plain with painted reveals and brick flat arched heads. The fenestration is timber sliding sash horizontally divided into two over two with vertical margin panes. A considerable amount of original crown glass survives on this house.

At eaves level a flat plain painted frieze four courses deep is surmounted by a square section projecting cornice which carries an ogee cast iron gutter. The cornice is decorated with four pairs of simple rectangular modillions.
The roof has a dormer with a three pilastered front framing two small sliding sash windows with shallow arched heads under a simple cornice. The barge boards are scalloped and surmounted by a finial and the cheeks are tile hung.
The chimneys are plain plastered with a simple square molded cornice and ornamented yellow clay pots

The rear elevation has been rendered.

The ground floor principal rear wall retains large sliding sash windows with six over six glazing. There are original two over two horizontally divided sliding sash windows to the rest of the rear elevation.

Historical information

At the beginning of the 19th century the present Malone Road was the main route south from Belfast to Dublin, climbing along the Malone ridge and twisting south-west towards Lisburn. Stretching westwards from this road and sloping down to the lower ground of the Bog Meadows were long, narrow strip farms. In the mid 1700s, many of these farms were leased by the Donegall estate to Belfast merchants and farmed by under-tenants, whose (largely) humble farmhouses were scattered along the road itself. In 1819, the present Lisburn Road was laid out, slicing through the farms, and by 1839 the Ulster Railway had been cut out through their lower fields. From 1823 onwards, leases ‘in perpetuity’ began to be granted by the Donegall estate in relation to land to the south of Belfast; thus, with the unity of the Malone farms destroyed the area became open to developers. The first wave of development was relatively modest and decidedly gentrified, with the building of small country villas, surrounded by spacious gardens, many occupying the former farm strips between the Malone and 'new' Lisburn Road. Among these –traveling in a southwards direction- where Fountainville Cottage (close to today's Fountainville Avenue), Elm Wood, (roughly where QUB Student’s Union now stands), Vermont (on the site of the present Methodist College), Wellington Park Cottage (present Wellington Park area), Eglantine Hill (present Eglantine Avenue area), Windsor and Derryvolgie (around what is now Windsor and Derryvolgie Avenues respectively).

In the later 1840s and 50s, following the establishment of Queen’s College in the vicinity, and the beginnings the movement of Belfast’s rising merchant classes out of the centre of the town, portions of the grounds of many of the above properties began to be sold off for the building of groups of (relatively grand) terraced and semi-detached dwellings. The development of Wellington Park and Wellington Park Terrace, was part of this expansion of housing, which was, over the course of the next 40 years or so, to lead to the establishment of the suburbs of the University / Malone area we see today.

Stephen Carleton's research has shown that nos.1 and 3 of what was to become Wellington Park Terrace were built in 1854. They are recorded in the valuation of 1858 as occupied by a Frances Ogilby (no.1) and William Ferguson (no.3), both properties leased from a John Devlin and valued at £22. Annotations within the same valuation book show that nos.9-15 were built between 1858-60. The man responsible for their construction was John Lowry, a watchmaker with premises in High Street, for in 1858 he is noted as holding the lease of the plot they were later to fill from George Tate, (a timber merchant and major landholder in the area, after whom Tate's Avenue is named). Lowry himself was the first to live in the newly-built no.9, with no.11 first occupied by a Henrietta Walsh, no.13 by James S. Sheerer, and no.15 by an Andrew Munce, with all dwellings valued at £13. No.15, at the then west end of the block, appears to have been originally entered via a porch to the gable.

In 1862, Lowry subdivided the land to the rear of these houses (which had been noted as being 'in pasture') and sub-let this to a Nathaniel Greer, who by the end of the following year had built the present nos.24 and 26 Wellington Park. By this stage also, a Mary Pollock and a Mary Anne Kearney had become the occupants of nos.13 and15 respectively. In the early years the rate of turnover of tenants in all of the properties was notably high.

The sequence of events in the years immediately following 1860 is confusing, with the valuations full of undated overlapping notes, and the accompanying maps not fully annotated. It is clear, however, that nos.5-7 were the next to be built (by John Lowry once again), with a Thomas Frazer responsible for the development of nos.17-21. The dating is not certain, but an analysis of the handwriting styles of the various valuers, (and their inadvertent use of subtlety different ink colours), suggests that all may have been in place by 1869; but this is not certain, for the street directory of 1870 appears to list only six houses. All eleven properties are recorded in the directory of 1877, however, and the use of the name ‘Wellington Park Terrace’ in a Belfast City Corporation minute of 1874, suggests that all were present at that point.

Some time after the building of nos.17-21, no.15 was extended to join with the no.17, thus creating an unbroken terrace from no.3 to 21. One would assume that this work was carried out in or shortly after c.1869, when no.17 itself was built. The valuations, however, make no mention of any extension prior to at least 1883, and a gap is shown in the terrace on Marcus Ward & Co.’s 1884 and 1888 maps of Belfast. The accuracy of these maps is questionable (for instance they do not show nos.5-7 either), but it is odd that the valuations do not mention any alterations to the property. The detailing to the door screen looks post 1880, but of course this could well have been changed later.

It has been suggested that the terrace was built as the first part of what was intended to be a square, however, as has been demonstrated, the development was piecemeal and undertaken by different individuals, with no evidence of any grander scheme behind it all. On the contrary, the large garden to the immediate south belonging to Eglantine Hill, which remained largely untouched until the later 1880s, would have prohibited such a grand plan. The fact that the houses ultimately ended up 'sandwiched' between two larger terraces is a consequence of the fact that when the grounds of Eglantine Hill were eventually completely sold off, the developers of that found it more convenient to create a new broad thoroughfare to the south, the present Eglantine Avenue.

References- Primary sources
1 PRONI LA/7/2EA Belfast Corporation minute books, 1847-87
2 PRONI VAL/2B/7/4H Second valuation, Belfast St. George's ward, 1858-60
3 PRONI VAL/12E/192C/49/1 Annual valuation revision map, Belfast sheet 49, 1858-63
4 ‘Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory…’ (Belfast News-Letter 1861- )
5 PRONI VAL/12B/43D/1-7 Annual valuation revision books, Belfast St. George's ward, 1862-82
6 PRONI VAL/12E/192C/49/2 Annual valuation revision map, Belfast sheet 49, 1863-83
7 PRONI VAL/12B/43D/8-14 Annual valuation revision books, Belfast St. George's ward, 1882-96
8 PRONI VAL/12E/192C/49/3 Annual valuation revision map, Belfast sheet 49, 1883-1906
9 Marcus Ward & Co., ‘Map of Belfast…1884’, in Marcus Ward & Co, ‘Belfast and Province of Ulster Post Office directory’ (Belfast 1884) [There is a 1888 version of this map also.]
10 PRONI VAL/12B/43D/15-18 Annual valuation revision books, Belfast St. George's ward, 1897-1905
11 PRONI VAL/12B/43D/19-20 Annual valuation revision books, Belfast St. George's ward, 1906-15
12 PRONI VAL/12E/192C/49/4 Annual valuation revision map, Belfast sheet 49, 1906-35
13 PRONI VAL/12B/43D/21-22 Annual valuation revision books, Belfast St. George's ward, 1916-30

Secondary sources
1 Carleton, S.T., ‘The growth of South Belfast’ (QUB MA thesis 1967)
2 Evans, David, ‘Historic buildings, groups of buildings, areas of architectural importance in the vicinity of Queen’s University of Belfast’ revised edition (Belfast,1980), p.26 etc.
3 Larmour, Paul, ‘The architectural heritage of Malone and Stranmillis’, (Belfast, 1991), pp.177-80
4 Royle, Stephen A., 'Belfast part II, 1840-1900 - Irish Historic towns atlas no.17, (RIA, Belfast City Council, 2007)

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
D. Plan Form
I. Quality and survival of Interior
J. Setting
K. Group value

Criteria for listing: historic interest

X. Local Interest
Z. Rarity

Evaluation

An attractive Mid Victorian house retaining most of its original features, which forms part of an unusual and distinctive terrace setting.