Fifth Street is a short residential street in west Belfast, located between Conway Street and N Howard Street, a short distance south of the Shankill Road. It forms part of a compact grid of numbered streets laid out during the nineteenth-century expansion of the town.
The district in which Fifth Street lies developed during the first half of the nineteenth century as Belfast expanded rapidly in response to industrial and population growth. Housing in this area was laid out in a regular grid, with short east–west streets intersected by longer north–south routes such as Conway Street and North Howard Street.
Fifth Street is documented by at least March 1856. A report in the Belfast News-Letter of 11 March 1856 records a court case involving a fifteen-year-old boy convicted of breaking into a vacant house in Fifth Street with felonious intent. The report confirms both the existence of the street by this date and the presence of residential property upon it, including vacant houses, reflecting the rapid and sometimes uneven occupation of newly built streets during this period of urban growth.
This evidence places Fifth Street firmly within Belfast’s mid-nineteenth-century urban fabric, contemporaneous with neighbouring numbered streets such as First Street, Second Street, Third Street, and Fourth Street. The street has remained predominantly residential in character, forming part of the dense terraced housing typical of working-class districts close to the Shankill Road.
Fifth Street is a functional, sequential name. It reflects its position within a numbered series of parallel streets rather than commemorating a person, event, or local feature. Such numerical naming was common in areas of rapid nineteenth-century housing development, allowing for straightforward identification during large-scale urban expansion.
Belfast News-Letter, 11 March 1856
Ordnance Survey of Ireland / Ordnance Survey of Northern Ireland, historical mapping
OSNI modern digital mapping
Belfast street directories
Local cartographic evidence