7 Ann Street, Gilford, Craigavon, Co Down, BT63 6HX

7 Ann Street is a two-bay, two-storey mid-terrace house built around 1840, located east of Gilford Mill and north-west of Gilford town centre. It forms part of a terrace of twenty-five dwellings on Ann Street (excluding the gate lodge at No. 1) and is of particular interest for its close relationship with the adjacent linen thread spinning mill and as a well-preserved example of mill workers' housing in the town. The terrace as a whole has been altered over the years, which has diminished the integrity of the group, but its location and relationship to the mill and its setting remain significant, and this section of the terrace represents a good example of its type.

The building is rectangular in plan, with a single-storey lean-to extension and garage to the rear. The roof is pitched and finished in natural slate to the front slope, with artificial slate to the rear slope and tiles to the rear lean-to, with terracotta ridge tiles. The chimneystack is rendered and fitted with clay pots. Rainwater goods are uPVC. The external walling is finished in painted ruled-and-lined render.

The windows are replacement 1-over-1 timber sliding sashes with projecting masonry sills; timber casements are used to the rear. The principal elevation faces south and is three openings wide, with the two windows to the right widely spaced. To the left is a replacement four-panelled timber door, approached by three masonry steps. The west gable abuts the adjoining property. The rear (north) elevation has a first-floor window to the left; at ground-floor level the left side is abutted by a single-storey lean-to return, with a window to the ground-floor centre; to the right, a large single-storey lean-to garage of no architectural interest is attached. The lean-to return has a window to its centre; its right cheek has a door; its left cheek abuts the boundary wall. The east gable abuts the adjoining property on that side. The property has a small garden to the rear.

A view of the mill said to date from around 1841, shortly after its completion, shows the terrace including this building. The terrace first appears on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, captioned "Ann Street". A photograph of 1900 records the original fenestration: 3-over-6 sliding sash windows at first-floor level and 6-over-6 to the ground floor, with a solid timber door surmounted by a transom window.

The terrace was built by the proprietors of the adjacent linen thread spinning mill — originally known as Dunbar and Thompson, and later trading as Dunbar McMaster & Co Ltd — a hugely successful business that was largely responsible for the growth and prosperity of Gilford throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The founder, Hugh Dunbar, was descended from a linen family: his grandfather had leased a property at Huntley from the Whytes of Loughbrickland, where Hugh had been manufacturing thread with the help of hand-loom weavers producing linen cloth. By 1834, competition from mill-spun yarns produced by the new wet-spinning process compelled Dunbar to establish his own spinning mill or face ruin. He chose Gilford as the centre of his new enterprise and entered into partnership with William Agnew Stewart and Robert Thompson to raise the necessary capital. Land was obtained from Hugh Law of Woodbank for the mill itself, and the tail race ran through the land of James Uprichard of Bannvale. The spinning mill opened in 1839 as Dunbar and Thompson, Stewart having died in 1837. It was an immediate success and drew large numbers of workers to the town: between 1841 and 1851 the population more than quadrupled, from 643 to 2,814.

Hugh Dunbar took his responsibilities as an employer seriously, providing his workforce with a structure of social welfare support including a medical attendant and a school. He began building houses for his workers almost immediately after the mill opened. By 1870 the mill was employing over 2,000 workers, and between 1836 and 1862 the company built 200 houses. All properties owned by the mill were inspected monthly, and annually lime-washed, painted, and repaired at the firm's expense.

The Ann Street terrace is listed in Griffith's Valuation of 1863. The houses varied in size and valuation from £5 to £10, and were generally larger than other houses built by the company, suggesting they may have been intended as accommodation for mill supervisors; they were described as "slightly decayed but in repair." The first recorded resident of No. 7, one of the larger houses in the terrace, was Hugh Martin. His two-storey house with three outbuildings measured approximately 9 by 7 yards, with a single-storey return measuring 2½ by 2 yards. The house was leased from Dunbar McMaster & Co and valued at £8 10s. Subsequent tenants included William Drake (1872), Hugh Best (1878), and the Reverend Templeton (1883), minister of the nearby Methodist church, indicating that the building served briefly as the Methodist manse. Reverend Templeton was followed by Andrew Gregg (1887), Joseph Hicks (1894), and Thomas Adamson (1898). Adamson was resident at the time of both the 1901 and 1911 censuses. In 1901 he was recorded as a mechanic hackle-maker, living with his wife and two children, two grandchildren, and a boarder — a commercial clerk from Germany. By 1911 Adamson had become a hackle setter, and his son and grandson had both followed him into the mill, working as a reeling master and an apprentice hackle setter respectively.

In 1879, following the imposition of a very high import tax on linen thread in the United States, Hugh Dunbar McMaster established a mill in Greenwich Village, New York, bringing over workers and machinery from Ireland and installing his brother John as manager. The emigration of workers from Gilford had a significant effect on the town's population, which halved between 1871 and 1881. The company nonetheless continued to thrive in Gilford and achieved a worldwide reputation: the British Trade Journal of 1890 reported that the firm exported "twine for salmon fishing to British Columbia, carpet threads, book-binder's threads, extra strong threads for leather and thick cloths and fine threads for the sewing-machinist and lace maker...to the United States, South and Central America, Brazil, Australia and the rest of the British Colonies." The owners maintained a paternalistic interest in their workers and in the life of the town, which continued to revolve around the mill through much of the 20th century. A decline in the Ulster linen industry eventually led to the mill's closure in the early 1980s. The building has been retained in use as a dwelling.