Seacourt, 5 & 6 Seacourt, Maxwell Drive, Maxwell Road, Bangor, Co Down, BT20 3LE

Seacourt is a grand, symmetrical, classically styled Italianate house of two storeys and three bays, built around 1865, overlooking the sea on the north side of Bangor. It was built for Foster Connor, a prominent Belfast linen merchant, and was possibly designed by Charles Lanyon or James Hamilton, though neither attribution has been confirmed. The builders were Henrys, the same firm responsible for the Albert Bridge in Belfast. The house is now subdivided into two apartments, but its fine original detailing and fabric survive largely intact. It has group value with its boundary wall, gate piers, and the remains of a walled garden, all of which are separately listed. The setting has been significantly compromised by modern housing development within the former grounds, which has also resulted in the demolition of parts of the associated structures and has separated the house from its original entrance.

Architectural Description

The house is square on plan, with a porch to the east, a central bowed bay to the north, and a more recent townhouse extension added to the south rear. The roof is U-shaped and hipped, finished in natural slate with leaded hips around a flat central valley with a lantern. There are five cement-rendered chimneystacks with corniced caps. Gutters are concealed behind an eaves cornice carried on console brackets, with a leaded blocking course above and a narrow frieze set with small circular panels below. Rainwater goods are cast iron.

The external walls are cement rendered, with band rustication to the ground floor and ruled-and-lined render to the first floor, divided by a projecting string course. Windows are one-over-one horned timber sashes: square-headed to the first floor and generally segmental-headed to the ground floor, except on the east entrance elevation. They are typically set in shallow recesses with panelled aprons and moulded architrave surrounds that sweep down to the lower ends of the jambs; those to the ground floor also have lugs. First-floor windows have a decorative reeded keyblock and a frieze with rosette detail. Sills throughout are sandstone.

East (Entrance) Elevation

The principal entrance faces east and is symmetrically arranged, with three openings to each floor around a central porch. The porch is classically detailed with a dentil cornice and triglyph frieze. The door and its flanking sidelights are framed by egg-and-dart corner pilasters, with a central pedimented sandstone projection carried on fluted Doric columns. The door itself is four-panelled with bolection moulding and cast-iron ironmongery, set beneath an archivolt on impost mouldings with a plain round-arched fanlight above and panelled spandrels to either side. The porch is surmounted by a fretted sandstone parapet that extends to form balconettes to the first-floor side bay windows, and has a window to each cheek. Access is via a sandstone threshold reached by a stone platform and two sandstone steps, enclosed on either side by a balustrade.

South (Rear) Elevation

The south elevation has a window to each floor on the right-hand side. At the centre is a slight three-storey projection incorporating a mezzanine and attic storey over a ground floor. To the left is the gabled, truncated remains of a former three-storey return, two bays of which have been demolished. The entire rear is abutted by a modern two-storey townhouse. The exposed section of the gable is blank. The west elevation of the return is flush with the main body of the house and has a round-arched window to the attic, breaking the eaves line, and a window to the mezzanine level; the ground floor is abutted by a timber conservatory.

West Elevation

The west elevation is two windows wide, extending southward via the return described above, from which it is separated by a lesene strip. It is partially abutted at ground level by the conservatory, which is of timber construction with moulded transoms and mullions, round-arched lights over a rendered dwarf plinth wall, and a hipped roof with a bitumen-covered central flat and a central polygonal timber lantern fitted with stained-glass lights. There are double-leaf timber panelled-and-glazed doors to both the west and north, each sheltered by a panelled timber canopy supported on fluted columns.

North (Sea-Facing) Elevation

The north elevation faces the sea and is symmetrically arranged about a central bowed bay. Ground-floor windows within the bowed bay are formed in sandstone, with a fretwork balcony on stone brackets above at first-floor level. The bowed bay has five windows to the ground floor and four to the first floor, with two further windows to either side at each level. There are grilles to a basement tunnel at this elevation.

Historical Notes

The site was open, undeveloped fields at the time of the 1858 Ordnance Survey map. Seacourt does not appear in Griffith's Valuation of 1856 to 1864, but is recorded in the first Annual Revisions fieldbook of 1866, suggesting construction began around 1865. At that date the house, outoffices and gate lodge were together valued at £80. By 1870 the valuation had risen to £180, indicating that the main house and outbuildings were still under construction during this period; a further revision to £187 in 1877 suggests Connor continued to make improvements throughout that decade.

Foster Connor went to considerable expense in the construction of the house and is recorded as having brought a craftsman from Italy specifically to execute the main ceiling mouldings and the impressive ceiling dome. By 1860, the Journal of the Society of Arts had named Foster Connor and Co as one of the six principal linen manufacturers in Belfast; Connor was also a keen yachtsman. He died in 1881, after which the house passed to his son Charles C. Connor.

In 1895 the house was purchased for £5,000 by Samuel Cleland Davidson, the inventor and industrialist behind the Sirocco Works in Belfast. Davidson carried out repairs and alterations including the installation of central heating and a timber pulpit staircase, and as a result the property's valuation rose to £285 in 1915, though this was subsequently reduced to £260 following an appeal. A number of photographs survive from the Davidson period, taken by Davidson himself — an enthusiastic photographer — showing the family in front of the house and enjoying a private bathing box and coastal balcony.

Samuel Davidson was born in 1846 into a family of mill-owners. After working in the family business and in a surveyor's office, he travelled to India at the age of 17 to join a cousin on a tea plantation, taking with him twenty gold sovereigns, a shotgun, a pistol, a fiddle, and a camera. He learned the rudiments of tea cultivation, modernised the plantation's bookkeeping, and designed his own bungalow, which was subsequently copied by others. He was placed in charge of his own estate at the age of 19 and began to improve production and efficiency, leading to a patent for a drying machine in 1869 and a tea roller in 1870. In 1875 he developed an improved tea drier and returned to Belfast to have the prototype manufactured, then transported this and a rotary hoe of his own invention around the Indian tea plantations to fulfil the orders he received. He eventually returned to Belfast and set up his own factory at Bridge End in 1881 to manufacture driers, using a fan also of his own invention. The firm was eventually named Sirocco, after the drying desert wind. The fans were later adopted by the British, German, and United States navies for use in the boiler rooms of their ships, and were also used in the London Underground and the Mersey Tunnel. Prior to Indian independence, Sirocco supplied 70% of India's tea-processing machinery. Census returns of 1901 and 1911 record Samuel Davidson, described as an engineer, at Seacourt with his wife, some of his adult children, and a small household staff comprising a parlour maid, housemaid, cook, and kitchenmaid. Davidson was an inventor throughout his life, registering over 120 patents; the Ulster Museum still holds a kerosene pump used to draw water from a well at Seacourt to a tank in the roof, which simultaneously operated a butter churn. He died in 1921, shortly after being knighted.

There is a tradition that the basement tunnel beneath the house, originally part of the heating system, was used for the storage of guns in April 1914 during the Larne gun-running operation, with members of the Davidson family said to have been involved using their Nordenfelt car. It has been estimated that in 1914 there were only around one thousand cars in the north of Ireland, and that the Ulster Unionist Council arranged for approximately half of these to be at Larne to receive the twenty thousand rifles destined for the Ulster Volunteer Force.

On Davidson's death the house passed to his younger daughter, Kathleen Hadow, both of his sons having died — one while serving with the Ulster Division at the Somme. During the Second World War, Mrs Hadow arranged for the house to be used as a convalescent home for officers, receiving approximately two hundred and fifty patients, and was subsequently awarded the MBE for her services. When Mrs Hadow died in 1970 the house passed to her daughter and was then sold in 1972 to the Down County Education Committee for use as a Teachers' Centre. When the Education and Library Board sold the property in 1989 it was divided into two apartments, and some development has since taken place within its former curtilage.

Setting

The house stands within what were originally extensive grounds, now mostly occupied by modern housing. A formal walled garden survives to the west, and there is a lawned terrace with a tennis court to the north. The garden contains several flights of stone steps and gravel paths. To the east is a tarmac parking area. The original entrance avenue has been blocked off, and access is now via a modern cul-de-sac off Maxwell Road. The original gate piers survive as the entrance to a separate cul-de-sac to the east. The entire site is bounded by high stone boundary walls, part of which is separately listed.