Lilliput Street takes its name from “Lilliput Cottage”, the country residence of the educationalist David Manson (1716-1792), built in 1760. In teaching children basic literacy, Manson sought to exclude “drudgery and fear” by developing the use of play and peer tutoring. He taught, amongst others, Mary Ann McCracken and Ellen Joy, daughter of Henry Joy.
Manson named his house after Dean Swift’s Kingdom of Lilliput, the island of the tiny people in Gulliver’s Travels. The house is shown on Williamson’s map of Belfast (1791). The 1852 edition of Henderson’s Belfast Street Directory features it as Lilliput (Old Carrickfergus Road) and within the reference there is Lilliput Cottage and Lilliput House.