12 Ann Street, Gilford, Craigavon, County Down, BT63 6HX

12 Ann Street is a two-bay, two-storey mid-terrace house built around 1840–1850, situated east of Gilford Mill and north of Gilford town centre. It forms part of a terrace of 25 dwellings on Ann Street (excluding the gatehouse at No. 1) and was originally constructed as part of a back-to-back housing complex for workers at the adjacent linen thread spinning mill. The building has been retained in residential use but has undergone extensive alterations over the years, leaving little historic fabric remaining. It was removed from the statutory list on 1 November 2013 on the grounds that, while of local interest, it is not among the best examples of its type and its architectural and historic interest has been significantly reduced by these alterations.

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The house is roughly square on plan, with a single-storey modern extension to the rear. The roof is pitched and covered in natural slate with angled ridge tiles. There is a rendered chimney stack with clay pots. Cast-iron half-round rainwater goods are used to the front, with uPVC to the rear. The external walls are finished in painted ruled-and-lined render.

The windows throughout are replacement 2/2 timber casements with horizontal glazing bars and projecting masonry sills. The principal elevation faces east and has a window centrally placed at first-floor level; at ground floor there is a modern half-panelled timber door to the right and a window to the left. The south elevation abuts the neighbouring property. The rear (west) elevation has a window at first-floor level and is fully abutted at ground level by a flat-roofed extension. This extension has a large timber casement window to the left and a glazed timber-framed door to the right, accessed by five steps; the right side of the extension abuts the neighbouring building, and the left side was not viewed during inspection. The north elevation is also abutted by the adjoining property.

The house sits on the main road through Gilford, within the terrace row. Vehicular access is available to the rear. The site is bounded towards the mill by mature trees.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The house was built by the proprietors of Gilford's linen thread spinning mill, which was founded by Hugh Dunbar in partnership with William Agnew Stewart and Robert Thompson. The mill opened in 1839 under the name Dunbar and Thompson (Stewart having died in 1837) and later traded as Dunbar McMaster & Co Ltd. It was a hugely successful enterprise, largely responsible for the rapid growth of Gilford during the 19th and 20th centuries.

Hugh Dunbar was descended from a linen-manufacturing family; his grandfather had leased property at Huntley from the Whytes of Loughbrickland, where Hugh had been making thread and employing hand-loom weavers to produce linen cloth. By 1834, competition from the new wet-spinning process made it necessary for Dunbar to establish a mechanised mill or cease trading. He chose Gilford for the venture, obtained land from Hugh Law of Woodbank, and ran the tail race through land belonging to James Uprichard of Bannvale. The mill 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. By 1870 the mill employed over 2,000 workers and had built around 200 houses for its workforce between 1836 and 1862. All mill-owned houses were inspected monthly, and were annually lime-washed, painted, and repaired at the firm's expense.

The terrace on Ann Street appears to be among the earliest housing built by the company. It was originally constructed as two rows of back-to-back houses: numbers 9 to 26 faced onto High Street, and behind them, sharing a common back wall, was a second row called Bann Street, whose houses faced towards the mill. A view of the mill said to date from around 1841, shortly after its completion, shows the rear of the terrace as it then appeared; both rows are also shown on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, captioned "High Street" and "Bann St[reet]". The back-to-back houses in Gilford have been described as "the most basic units available, having only two rooms with single windows at each floor they would have provided rather cramped living space for more than four occupants. The lack of rear doors and windows and the resultant reduction in ventilation was probably less critical in an open site which allowed unlimited circulation of fresh air. They were adequate for single occupation or smaller family units and would have been a considerable improvement on the poorer type of rural dwellings."

The houses were first listed in Griffith's Valuation of 1863 as the property of Dunbar McMaster & Co. The High Street houses were each valued at £2 10s, were two storeys, 15 feet long and 12 feet wide, and were rated as "deteriorated by age and not in good repair", indicating they had already been standing for some time. The Bann Street houses to the rear were valued slightly lower at £2 5s, despite being the same size.

The house now numbered 12 Ann Street was formerly numbered 13. The first tenant recorded there is William Kelly, with Hugh Murphy occupying the corresponding back house on Bann Street. Subsequent tenants included James Bain (1887), Sarah Kennedy (1902), George Kennedy (1904), Maggie Wilson (1902), William Hanna (1903), Joseph Roberts (1904), Mary Connolly (1907), and Sarah Davidson (1908). According to the 1901 census, George Kennedy — a mill worker — lived in the house with his wife Sarah and four children aged between 8 and 13. In the back house, William Henry Hanna lived with his wife and two young sons; both he and his wife worked at the mill, Hanna as an unskilled labourer.

By the time of the 1911 census, the tenant on the High Street side was Lucinda Banes, a 70-year-old spinster employed as a winder at the mill. On the Bann Street side lived Elizabeth McQuillan with her daughter, son-in-law, and grandson. Her daughter was a flax spinner and her son-in-law a yarn drier; they had been married 23 years and had one surviving child from three born to them. The house was also notable for the considerable mobility of its occupants, with many tenants recorded at two or more different addresses within the terrace over the years, and single people and childless couples frequently among the occupants alongside larger families.

In 1915, the back house fronting onto Bann Street was incorporated into the front house, and the combined dwelling was revalued at £4 10s with a weekly rent of 3s 3d. The house was subsequently occupied by James Harrison. The rear houses to the Bann Street side were for the most part absorbed into the front houses in 1915–16, although six of them remained in use until the 1930s.

In 1879, following the imposition of very high import tariffs on linen thread in the United States, Hugh Dunbar McMaster established a mill in Greenwich Village, New York, bringing workers and machinery over from Ireland and installing his brother John as manager. The resulting emigration of workers from Gilford had a significant effect on the town's population, which halved between 1871 and 1881; many of the early occupants of these houses are likely to have been part of that emigration. The Gilford mill nonetheless continued to thrive for some years and had 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 throughout much of the 20th century, but a decline in the Ulster linen industry eventually led to the mill's closure in the early 1980s.