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

10 Ann Street is a two-bay, two-storey mid-terrace house built around 1840–1850, situated east of Gilford Mill and forming part of a terrace of twenty-five dwellings on Ann Street (excluding the gatehouse at No. 1 Ann Street), north of Gilford town centre. The building was formerly part of a mill workers' complex of back-to-back houses. It has been altered considerably over the years, with little historic fabric now remaining. While of local interest, it is not considered among the best examples of its type, and the extent of alteration has reduced its architectural and historic significance to the point that it is no longer of special interest. It was removed from the statutory list on 1 November 2013.

The house is square on plan, with a two-storey modern return to the rear. The roof is pitched natural slate with angled ridge tiles. There is a rendered chimney stack with clay pots. Cast-iron half-round rainwater goods are fitted to the front, with uPVC to the rear. The external walls are finished in painted ruled-and-lined render. Windows are replacement 2/2 timber sliding sashes with horizontal glazing bars and projecting masonry sills; timber casements are fitted to the rear.

The principal elevation faces east. At first-floor level there is a single window to the centre. At ground-floor level, a modern half-panelled timber door sits to the right, with a window to the left. The south elevation is abutted by the adjoining building. The west (rear) elevation has a window to the first floor on the right side and is abutted on the left by the two-storey return; the remainder was not viewed during survey. The return has a large timber casement window to both ground and first floor on the gable; the right cheek was not viewed, and the left cheek is blank at first-floor level; the ground floor was not viewed. A timber sheeted door on the right leads to an enclosed yard. The north elevation is abutted by the adjoining building to the north.

The house sits on the main road through Gilford, with vehicular access to the rear. The site is bounded toward the mill by mature trees.

The building is one of a terrace of former back-to-back houses built by the proprietors of the adjacent linen thread spinning mill — a hugely successful enterprise that was largely responsible for the growth and prosperity of Gilford throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. The mill was established in 1839 by Hugh Dunbar in partnership with William Agnew Stewart and Robert Thompson, trading initially as Dunbar and Thompson (Stewart having died in 1837) and later as Dunbar McMaster & Co Ltd. Land for the mill was obtained from Hugh Law of Woodbank, and the tail race ran through the land of James Uprichard of Bannvale. 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 and hand-loom weavers produced 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. The mill opened in 1839 and was an immediate success, attracting 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 the company built 200 houses between 1836 and 1862.

The terrace appears to be among the earliest housing built by the company. The houses were originally constructed as two back-to-back rows: numbers 9 to 26 opened onto High Street, and to the rear of these, sharing their back wall, was a further row called Bann Street, which opened towards the linen mill. The back-to-back configuration is shown on the second-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, captioned "High Street" and "Bann St[reet]", and 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. The houses in Bann Street were for the most part incorporated into the front houses in 1915–16, although six of them remained until the 1930s.

All houses owned by the mill were inspected monthly by the firm's owners, annually lime-washed, painted and repaired at the firm's expense. Hugh Dunbar, like many employers of his era, took his duties seriously, and the mill provided a structure of social welfare support including a medical attendant and a school.

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 often occupied by single people and couples without children, but it was not uncommon for these two-room dwellings to be home to a family of four or more. Valuation records and census returns show considerable mobility within the terrace, with many tenants living at two or more different addresses over the years.

The houses are listed in Griffith's Valuation of 1863 as the property of Dunbar McMaster & Co. The High Street houses were all valued at £2 10s and were two storeys, 15 feet long and 12 feet wide. They were rated as "deteriorated by age and not in good repair", indicating they had been standing for some time by that date. The Bann Street houses to the rear were valued at £2 5s, though they were the same size as those on High Street. The first tenant recorded at number eleven (now number ten) was John Gaskin; Patrick Barker occupied the house to the rear on Bann Street. Subsequent tenants in the two houses were Patrick Murphy (1887), Edward McConville (1902), John Burns Senior (1903), Erwin Beattie (1904), Bridget Keith (1908), John Teggart (date not recorded), and James Lewis (1922). The 1901 census records Edward McConville as a bleacher at the mill, living with his daughter, also a mill worker, and a boarder working as a general domestic servant. By 1911, McConville was 64 and still working as a bleacher; he then lived with his wife Margaret, who kept house. In 1915 the Bann Street house to the rear was incorporated into the front dwelling, and the property was revalued at £4 10s with a rent of 3s 3d per week.

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. Workers and machinery were brought over from Ireland, and Hugh's brother John was installed as manager. The emigration of workers from Gilford had a very significant effect on the town's population, which halved between 1871 and 1881; many of the initial occupants of these houses are likely to have been part of this emigration. The company nonetheless continued to thrive in Gilford 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 retained a paternalistic interest in their workers and in the life of the town, which revolved around the mill for 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.