Cricket Pavilion, Liddel's Mill, 43 Main Street, Donaghcloney

Cricket Pavilion, Liddell's Mill, Donaghcloney

This single-storey cricket pavilion, built in 1900–01, is an increasingly rare surviving example of an Edwardian sports pavilion and one of the finest illustrations of the Domestic Revival style applied to a leisure building in this part of Ulster. It was constructed at a cost of £131 and was possibly designed by the architects Hobart and Heron. The listing covers the pavilion itself together with its railings.

The building is roughly square in plan and double-pile in section. Its overhanging double-gabled roof is finished in natural slate with red fireclay pierced ridge tiles and gable finials, some of which are damaged. Shaped and exposed rafter tails support ogee cast-iron guttering and circular downpipes. A prominent decorative feature throughout is the applied half-timbered treatment to each of the gables. The external walls are red clay facing brick set on a chamfered base.

All four elevations are symmetrical. To each side are paired gables, while the front and rear elevations each have a centrally positioned gablet. The front, east-facing elevation is the principal façade. A hooped wrought-iron fence delineates a small garden enclosure at ground level, with central steps framed by side walls leading up to an open raised and recessed veranda. Plain pillars and brick piers support the overhanging roof, with the central section carried on square timber pillars with curved timber braces rising from plain timber dosserets. At the centre of this elevation are paired flat-headed door openings with flat brick arch lintels and bull-nosed reveals with chamfer stops. The doors are timber-sheeted with paired glazed panels. To either side is a flat-headed window opening fitted with a four-light timber frame with top-hung openers; reveals and sills are painted timber. A later wrought-iron railing with a scrolled motif runs along the outer edge of the veranda.

The north and south elevations are mirror images of each other, each with a flat-headed window opening centred on the gable fitted with four-light frames and top-hung openers incorporating semi-circular features to the opener frames. A semi-circular door opening at the end of each elevation exposes the veranda beyond. The south façade has seen the insertion of a later modern window frame and a centrally positioned pass door, which are the only differences between the two. The rear, west-facing elevation is flanked on both sides by externally accessed later lean-to toilet extensions, with a window opening at the centre fitted with a timber frame of the same type as elsewhere.

The pavilion sits in an unspoiled setting: the former bleach green to the east now forms the cricket pitch, which is wrapped around on three sides by the River Lagan. It has group value with the other listed buildings of the former Liddell's Mill industrial complex of which it formed part.

The pavilion was built as part of the wider social provision made by William Liddell and Co. for the workers of what had become, by the early 1900s, one of the leading damask manufacturers in Ulster — and reportedly at one point the largest in the world — notably supplying linen for the ill-fated Titanic. The Liddell family were responsible for the development of Donaghcloney itself as an industrial village from the late 19th century onwards, constructing workers' housing, a church in 1894, a schoolhouse in 1912 (consecrated for use as a church around 1980), a cricket pitch, and a cycle track, in keeping with the practice of several local mill owners.

The industrial history of the site stretches back considerably further. The area around Donaghcloney appears to have functioned as a crossing point on the River Lagan since the early 18th century, when Banoge Bridge was constructed there. The land was held from the Gill Hall estate by the Dempster family from 1708, and linen production was likely being carried out on the site as early as 1742, when a linen draper named Marmaduke Dempster held the property. The Dempsters retained the land until 1806, when David Dempster sold the lease to a John Currell of Moylurg; Currell relinquished it in 1808, and in 1812 Dempster sold it to John Brown (1770–1834). No buildings are shown on the site on James Williamson's County Down map of 1810, but shortly after acquiring the land John Brown is believed to have constructed a new bleach mill — the long narrow building at the north end of the present complex, which carries a non-contemporary date stone reading "Jn. Brown A.D. 1813". By the time of the Ordnance Survey map of 1834, this building and several smaller structures were shown, together with the large bleach green stretching to the riverbank. The Ordnance Survey Memoirs of October 1834 describe the site as a bleach green and mill capable of finishing 10,000 pieces of linen per annum and giving constant employment to around 16 men. The first valuation of 1835 records the long bleach mill — described as containing beetling mills, a wash house and a drying loft — as measuring 137½ feet by 27 by 23 feet, with a further beetling mill of 33 by 26½ by 9 feet, a boiling house of 17½ by 16 by 11 feet, a dwelling house of 36½ by 19 by 10 feet, and an accompanying office of 21 by 19 by 9 feet. The mill was water-driven, with three wheels each 15 feet in diameter, all in full work at the time of survey.

After John Brown's death in 1837 the mill passed to his brother James and his 14-year-old son John Shaw Brown. Part of the property — the house and the bleach green — was sold to Robert G. Nicholson, owner of a bleachworks in the nearby townland of Banoge. James Brown continued the business and by 1840 was reported to be employing 250 damask weavers. On his death in 1851, all of the land was sold to Nicholson. In 1855, William Liddell, a cousin of the Nicholsons, was given the option of acquiring the lease of both the Donaghcloney and Banoge mills. To finance this he entered into partnership with John Shaw Brown and a Mr Magee of Lurgan. Magee was apparently bought out in 1861, and Brown withdrew from the partnership in 1866 to found his own mill at Edenderry near Belfast, leaving the entire Donaghcloney concern in the hands of the reconstituted firm of William Liddell and Co.

During the three decades following 1835, the mill complex expanded on a relatively modest scale, with the Ordnance Survey map of 1858 showing additions to the north and south ends of the large bleach mill as well as several other smaller buildings. The second valuation of around 1861 records no detail beyond a valuation figure of £40, unchanged from 1835. This was soon to alter dramatically. Like many other Irish linen mills, Donaghcloney benefited greatly from the boom in the linen industry brought about by restrictions on cotton supplies during the American Civil War. By 1864 the rateable value of the works had doubled to £80, and by 1867 had leapt again to £290. This latter increase was largely driven by the construction of a new weaving factory built to hold 280 looms, a 30-horsepower steam engine, and a gasworks. This factory, built for the production of damask linen using power looms, appears to have been initiated by W. and G. Moorehead, brothers-in-law of the late Robert G. Nicholson, but was shortly afterwards acquired by the newly formed William Liddell and Co. It comprised the square northern section of the present large single-storey north-light roofed mass of buildings to the south of the old mill of 1813, as well as the two-storey southern section of the office block and the portion linking it to the main factory.

A further rise in rateable value to £294 10s may indicate an extension to the weaving factory or the construction of some of the smaller freestanding buildings west of the original bleach mill shown on the 1903 Ordnance Survey map, though this is not certain. In 1889 a new workshop consisting of two single-storey blocks measuring 27 yards by 13 and 24 by 13 — both probably attached to the main factory — was added, raising the valuation to £300.

A sketch of the premises printed on the cover of the firm's catalogue of 1896 appears to show a view from the north. It depicts the complex enclosed by a wall with a grand carriage entrance, presumably at the south end of the drive off Main Street. The original bleach mill is shown as three storeys, set next to an equally tall though seemingly two-storey structure with a bellcote — probably the building (since altered) still visible in the same position today. According to Charles Brett, who had access to an unpublished manuscript history of the business, the original mill was indeed fully three-storeys high; whether that history drew this information solely from the 1896 drawing is not known. What is clear is that at some point the uppermost portions of the walls were rebuilt in brick and the roof replaced — the valuers recorded the building as 23 feet high in 1835 and 19 feet in 1908. Internal evidence shows that all the floors have been replaced and the uppermost floor structure removed to create a double-height first-floor level, though this removal appears to have taken place at a more recent date, after the upper wall sections were rebuilt.

In 1898 the northern half of the office block — originally also containing drying rooms and measuring 43 feet by 34½ by 33 feet — was constructed at a cost of £650, raising the rateable value of the whole concern to £322. This rose to £338 in 1904 following minor single-storey additions to the north and east sides of the main factory, and again following the building of the cricket pavilion in 1900–01. Further extensions to the east and south sides of the factory — a card store and cloth store — were built in 1908, along with the installation of a new engine replacing the gasworks, increasing the valuation to £360, with larger extensions to the south side added in 1910 raising it to £450. Another addition spanning the whole south side of the factory, together with additions to its north-western and south-western corners, was constructed in 1915 (possibly to designs by Hobart and Heron), lifting the valuation to £500. By 1925 the valuers noted further alterations in progress — the nature and extent of which they did not detail — but these appear likely to have involved further expansion of the main factory in single-storey form, with the rateable value of the whole collection of buildings rising to £560 as a result. Apart from the construction of some substantial warehouses at the southern end of the factory in the 1970s and 1980s, most of the complex as it stands today was in place by the end of the 1920s.

In 1973 the company merged with the Belfast firm of William Ewart and Sons to become Ewart Liddell, who in 2001 were acquired by the Baird McNutt Group. The Donaghcloney site remained in operation until around 2002. Since then the complex has remained largely idle. In recent years some buildings to the west of the old bleach mill have been demolished and others bricked up.