Rugby Road, Belfast

60-64 Rugby Road, Belfast (Timothy Ferres, 2023)

RUGBY ROAD, Belfast, runs from 75 University Street to Agincourt Avenue.

This leafy avenue, developed in the early 1860s, is within easy walking distance of the Queen's University and Botanic Gardens in the city.

The Ulster Architectural Heritage Society published a gazetteer in 1968 about buildings in the vicinity of the University.

60 Rugby Road, Belfast (Timothy Ferres, 2023)

It was compiled originally by A J Rowan and C E B Brett; revised in in 1975 by Hugh Dixon and David Evans.

Today I paid a visit to Rugby Road, still an attractive street with considerable character.

Side elevation of 60 Rugby Road, Belfast (Timothy Ferres, 2023)

I took a few photographs of "Rugby Terrace" on the road: of which numbers 60, 62, and 64 were the first houses to have been built, in 1864.

Porch, 60 Rugby Road (Timothy Ferres, 2023)

Trevor Carleton MA (my geography teacher at school in 1976) remarked at the time:

"Three two-storey houses, less elaborate than the large terrace opposite, but providing a positive, dignified response, with unusual tripartite windows and flat-roofed porches topped with cast-iron cresting."

FURTHER down the road, towards University Street, and at the corner of College Park Avenue, are numbers 7 and 9 Rugby Road, "Caledonia Terrace."

7-9 Rugby Road (Timothy Ferres, 2023)

Mr Carleton considered these as the "best pair of houses in an outstanding group," in the High Victorian style.

They were built in 1870.