Location
A short street in the historic Smithfield/Millfield district of Belfast city centre, running from Winetavern Street towards Millfield. Nineteenth-century directories describe it as extending between these two streets, with a small court (Samuel Street Court) opening off it.
Origins and meaning of the name
The origin of the name “Samuel Street” has not yet been definitively established. No surviving published source clearly identifies the individual or reference commemorated by the name. The name may derive from a local landowner or occupier, a merchant or tradesman associated with the area, or the use of a biblical or personal forename, which was common in early nineteenth-century Belfast street naming, particularly in dense inner-city developments around Smithfield and Millfield.
When it was established
Samuel Street was in existence by at least 1819. It is listed in Bradshaw’s General and Commercial Directory (1819), where occupied properties on Samuel Street are recorded, demonstrating that the street was already laid out, named, and inhabited by the early nineteenth century. The street continues to appear consistently in later Belfast street directories throughout the nineteenth century, confirming its place within the established urban fabric of the city.
Character and later history
Directory evidence indicates that Samuel Street was a modest working-class street, containing a small number of houses and a court. By the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries it formed part of a densely built inner-city neighbourhood serving the Smithfield and Millfield area. In the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries much of the original housing was cleared, and the street largely disappeared as a residential thoroughfare, leaving vacant land and redevelopment sites along its former line.
Sources
Bradshaw’s General and Commercial Directory, 1819.
Belfast Street Directory, 1843.
Belfast Street Directory, 1852.
Belfast Street Directory, 1861.
Belfast Street Directory, 1880.
Belfast Entries: Millfield area history.
Historic photographs and mapping of the Smithfield/Millfield district.