McMaster Street on site
Our project at McMaster Street started on site towards the end
of 2000. We have two houses "pepper-potted" in the street,
about twenty yards apart, both having been vacant for some years.
The worst one had been empty and blocked up for about ten years,
and it had been badly vandalised during that time, with a fire
lit in the first floor having damaged the roof timbers, and every
useful piece of timber damaged, rotted or removed, so it was a
"gutting" operation.
One of the fascinating things about
working with old buildings is that not only do we learn about
their history and feel a sense of excitement as the work progresses,
but almost always our builders share this pleasure. They are used
to ordinary building sites where you clear everything away and
rapidly cover the mud with standard concrete and steel, then build
standard blocks and so on. Derelict old houses can be dangerous,
they are always filthy, and the early stages of their restoration
can be disheartening as problems are uncovered. But there are
always discoveries.
In the early stages we had a couple
of labourers clearing out the piles of rubbish from the back yard
of the bad house, digging founds and excavating the subfloor of
the house. A dirty job, and not one anyone enjoys. But the older
man was talking about having been brought up in a similar house
in East Belfast, where he remembered as a kid they used a tin
bath, with water heated on the range, and his grandparents got
in it first, then the rest of the family one by one with Jeye's
Fluid poured in between each till by the time it came to his turn
the bath contained more disinfectant than water. It was then carried
into the yard and poured down the drain, and the bath was put
away for another week.
The young labourer also started life
in an East Belfast terraced house, but it was more comfortable
in his day, and his interest comes from speculating on what life
in the houses actually was like. He collects old bottles from
his excavations, and has a grand total of over fifty, including
examples of the old stoneware jugs milk used to come in. He found
a little medicine bottle under the old kitchen floor of the house,
and it seems likely that it dates from 1898 when the houses were
erected.
We recently learnt about a project
in a similar conservation area in England, where a building preservation
trust worked in collaboration with the local planning authority
to lay on demonstrations and open days as the job progressed,
showing how the traditional trades would have operated, and encouraging
other people to restore their houses rather than "improve"
them out of recognition. We have too little time to organise such
an elaborate project here, but do plan to hold some open days
at the end of the project, and hope to involve local schoolchildren
in that. Probably very few of them can imagine houses with tin
baths in the kitchen, let alone outside loos!
Over the years, much of the decorative brickwork in McMaster Street
has been painted over - originally to keep it looking smart, but
now usually just because it has been painted before and is too
difficult to remove. Naturally we want to remove the paint and
expose the creamy colour decorative bricks used round doors and
windows, but it has proved very resistant to all the usual paint
removers, and we are reluctant to use anything too strong. With
a lot of elbow grease, it comes off. The white paint is difficult
enough, but there is a stripe of red paint round the door which
is almost impossible to remove. At first we were told it was because
it was red lead. Then, when it proved really difficult, we were
told because - this being shipyard country - it was because it
was "red lead from the Titanic"!
Through time, all the windows in McMaster Street have been replaced.
Some of them are sash windows, as would have originally been in
the houses, but only one still follows the arched top of the original
openings. Most have a flat top (left). In restoring the houses,
one of the most important elements is putting back a more sympathetic
design of window. Our windows (right) are made of timber, and
have an arched top, so they fit snugly into the brick opening.
However unlike the original sashes these are double-glazed. Sadly,
it is often difficult to incorporate double glazing with old windows,
as small panes with intervening glazing bars cannot be replicated
in double glazing. (The mastic used to seal the glazing tends
to degrade with exposure, and has to be covered with substantial
timber beading). In this case the windows were plain, and we feel
the additional width of the main frame is tolerable, particularly
as the original windows had not survived.
When these houses were built, plasterboard was unknown, and indeed
the fast-setting modern plasters were also still to be evolved.
The walls were fitted out with battens to which split laths of
timber were nailed, and the plasterer applied a mixture of lime
and fine sand, often with horse-hair, to the laths, squeezing
the mix through the gaps in the laths to get a mechanical key.
Many of the laths had survived in one of our houses, but they
were not in uniformly good condition and many had to be replaced.
Many of the houses in the street now have the ground floor rooms
knocked together into one long room. Originally they were very
different rooms, the front one being the Parlour preserved for
"good occasions", and the back one the Kitchen where
daily life went on. The front room had a cornice, the back room
had a simple plaster dado. This picture shows the dado being run
again beside the kitchen range.
Because so few of the old terraced
streets of Belfast now survive intact, McMaster Street is often
used for filming. If you saw the recent episode of the ITV series
Cold Feet which was set in Northern Ireland you may have
spotted the brief visit the characters paid to McMaster Street.
One of Hearth's parent bodies, the
Ulster Architectural Heritage Society, is currently in receipt
of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund to enable it to develop
educational resources for shoolhchildren at Key Stage 2.
The school curriculum includes a study of the Victorian House,
and it seemed to the UAHS an ideal opportunity to open the McMaster
Street houses to local schools shortly before completion.
One Friday morning in May the Lord Mayor of Belfast, Cllr Sammy
Wilson, arrived in the street to be greeted by children from Beechfield
and Avoniel Primary Schools wearing Victorian costumes. He was
whirled round the street dancing to the fiddle of Ballymena musician
Willie Drennan, but was finally allowed to get his breath back
and make a speech launching the open day.
He said that he had been born in a street just like this, off
Donegall Pass in South Belfast, but that his house had sadly now
been demolished. He stressed the importance of keeping the remaining
terraces of parlour houses, not only for their historical interest
and their distinctively Belfast character, but also because they
were still attractive and viable houses, as the Hearth project
demonstrated.
The Lord Mayor was followed by Michael Coulter of the Environment
& Heritage Service, who explained why the street had been
listed and how much a part of Belfast life the "wee palaces"
were. Karen Latimer, Chairman of Hearth, thanked all those involved
in the project, and in particular those who had helped to make
the schools open day possible.
The children also walked round the street answering questions
in a worksheet which had been prepared for the day, and drawing
details like the terracotta vents and coloured brickwork. When
they had had enough of that there were stories to listen to and
Victorian street games to play with. Most of us found the metal
hoops hard to work, and were put to shame when one of the builders
showed us how easy it was when you knew how!
As part of the open day, a small exhibition
was put up giving a more detailed history
of the houses and explaining the balance between restoration
and improvements which had been struck during the work. These
were also summarised in a press release
issued on the day. Shortly after, we were contacted by a lady
who had been brought up in 42 McMaster Street, and the story
of her family brought the houses vividly to life. Click on
the phrases for more information on these.
Return to McMaster
Street
Return to Home
