Former Town Hall, 24 High Street, Donaghadee, Co Down

Former Town Hall, 24 High Street, Donaghadee

This is an impressive three-storey Georgian house dating from approximately 1770 to 1780, which dominates its position in the centre of High Street. The building is depicted in Samuel Louis De la Cherois's drawing of Donaghadee from 1817 and in D. Kennedy's watercolour of 1834, and a town map dating between 1771 and 1790 (probably around 1780) shows a large building on this site, confirming its late eighteenth-century origins.

The front facade is symmetrically arranged with a magnificent entrance at ground floor level. The doorway is framed by sandstone Ionic half-columns and pilasters on sturdy block plinths, supporting an unadorned entablature and pediment. The panelled door itself is set within v-jointed rusticated sandstone dressings, voussoirs and keystone. The entrance is now in poor condition, with badly worn and broken column capitals and damaged dressings.

Flanking the doorway are two windows to either side at ground floor level, all fitted with sliding sash frames containing Georgian panes and encased with plain pilasters, entablature and shallow pediment blocks. The first floor contains five slightly smaller windows of similar design but with shallow plain surrounds featuring segmental arch heads and keystones. The decorative surrounds to the ground and first floor windows were added circa 1900. The second floor has much squatter sash windows with Georgian panes. The front facade is finished in lined cement render, unpainted, with the ground floor render notably lighter in tone than the upper floors.

The gabled roof has rendered parapets and two rendered gable chimney stacks. The eaves course to the front facade features corbels. All roofs are covered in Bangor blue slates. Only the very top portion of the north-west gable is exposed, finished in lined render and blank. A two-storey shop is attached to this gable. The south-east gable is similarly blank and rendered.

The rear elevation features a full-height hipped roof stairwell projection slightly to the right of centre, with windows of varying sizes to each floor. To the right of this projection are two similar windows to the first and second floors. A small flat-roofed boiler house projection is attached to the ground floor, with a small recently inserted six-pane window at an intermediate level above it. The stairwell projection and right-hand side of the rear are unrendered, revealing rubble construction beneath.

The left side of the rear has two very small six-pane windows at high level to the first floor, with two larger windows to the second floor. A small extension with a mono-pitched roof is located at ground floor level to the far left, adjacent to a high rubble wall that encloses the large yard to the rear. The left side beyond the stairwell projection is finished in lined render, upon which the outline of a gabled building demolished in the 1960s is still visible.

Partly attached to the right-hand side of the rear is a long row of one and a half storey outbuildings, mainly constructed in rubble.

The building's history as documented shows that valuation records circa 1836 record it as 'house offices and yard' in the possession of Samuel Cochrane with a rateable value of £16. In 1914, it was sold for £800 to Mr. and Miss Pritchard, who operated a boarding house there. For most of the middle decades of the twentieth century, until the local government reforms of 1974, the property served as the town hall for Donaghadee Urban District Council. Georgian panes to the sash windows were restored sometime after 1977. The building now contains offices for a local employment scheme.