274 & 276 were built as a pair of ‘tenements’ for Mrs T Bush on Woolcombe Street and the drainage plan is stamped March 22, 1900. Mrs Bush lived nearby at 16 Woolcombe Street (The Terrace) in 1899, and the c.1900 houses are likely to have been built as speculative or rental properties on land that was subdivided from a larger property.
No.274 The Terrace appears to have been occupied by a middleclass family in its early years. This can be demonstrated by a 1911 auction of the furniture of Mrs E. Norton who left the house for “an extended holiday to Australia.” The auction included many ordinary items that are associated with Edwardian middleclass domesticity, including a piano, Sheraton chairs, a music cabinet inlaid with pearl, watercolours by Wilton, a Brussels carpet, and a hall settee.
From c.1924 onwards the property may have been in use as a boarding-house, as rooms ‘for let’ were advertised regularly in local newspapers. By 1944 these advertisements noted a preference for “elderly persons” and this suggests that the house was not in use as student accommodation despite its proximity to Victoria University. It was converted into two flats in 1973, and later purchased by Victoria House (student halls of residence) in 1984. It appears to have had few major visible alterations, except for site subdivision in c.2005, and has been renamed ‘Helen Royle House’.
No.276 has a similar history and appears to have been in use as a middleclass family home for the first forty years of its existence. It was home to Mr and Mrs L Borer in 1920, and the family appear to have been sufficiently wealthy to send their son, Oscar, to Victoria University and Canterbury Engineering School. Oscar later found work as an engineer for the port of London. The house and contents were auctioned in 1941, and the property was offered for sale again in 1942 as a comfortable two-storey six-room house that had been “completely renovated”. It had a modern bathroom and was priced at £2250. By October 1942 the house had been divided into tenancies and a three-room flat was offered for rent at £3 per week to one or more “quiet reliable adults”.
The building underwent fire protection upgrades in 1993 to accommodate use as a boarding house and was purchased by Victoria House from Ethal Violet Curtis in that year. It was subject to a major programme of alterations and refurbishment in 2005 when its neighbour at No.278 was replaced by a new four-storey student hostel. It is currently in use as a seven-bedroom student boarding-house as part of the Victoria House student halls of residence complex.
