Riversley House, 4 Church Street, Banbridge, Co Down, BT32 4AA

Riversley House, 4 Church Street, Banbridge

Riversley House is a symmetrical three-bay, two-storey-with-attic terraced house built around 1800, located on the east side of Church Street in Banbridge town centre and now in use by a Housing Association. It forms part of an important early-to-mid-19th-century terrace that charts both the founding and the subsequent growth of the town. Much of the original architectural detailing and the overall proportions survive, though a large two- and three-storey modern extension dominates the site to the rear, and the interior has been entirely refurbished with significant alterations to the original layout and considerable loss of historic fabric and character.

Architectural Description

The house has a rectangular plan with a pitched natural slate roof finished with blue-black angled ridge tiles. The rendered chimneystacks carry tall terracotta pots. Cast-iron ogee rainwater goods are fixed to a moulded and corbelled eaves course. External walls are finished in painted smooth render set on a contrasting plinth.

Windows throughout are replacement 6/6 timber sliding sashes with horns and projecting stone sills, with the exception of some uPVC casements noted below.

The principal elevation faces southwest and is arranged symmetrically around a central elliptical-arched doorcase, with three openings on each floor. Four granite steps lead up to a raised-and-pointed four-panel timber door flanked by sidelights and pilasters, surmounted by a segmental overlight, the whole set within a painted surround with V-joints.

The northwest elevation has two casement windows to the attic storey and is partially abutted by the adjoining building in the terrace. The northeast rear elevation has a replacement uPVC window to both ground and first floor on the left, and is abutted on the right by the large modern extension, which is of no architectural interest. The southeast elevation has two uPVC windows at attic level.

Setting

The house is set back from the street behind a small lawned front garden enclosed by a smooth rendered wall with square gate and corner piers having pointed caps. The central piers support a cast-iron latch gate. To the southeast gable a modern metal gate gives access to a rear entrance within the modern extension.

Historical Background

The current building dates from around 1800, but primary evidence suggests the terrace may have grown up around a core of earlier, simpler structures from the earliest days of the town's establishment. A stylised map of the "Bann Crossing" dating from 1703 shows a single-storey three-bay dwelling in the vicinity of the terrace, which may represent the first building on the site. A new bridge was erected across the River Bann in 1712, after which the town began to develop as a centre of the linen industry; by 1744 it held the largest linen cloth fairs in County Down. By this period the town had passed into the ownership of Wills Hill, Earl of Hillsborough, who laid out the streets and encouraged building by granting sections of land at nominal rents in perpetuity, supplemented by "town parks" — small farms on the edge of the town.

Maps of 1755 and 1771 show buildings on the site, as does the first edition Ordnance Survey map of 1833. That map reveals gaps in the terrace indicating that some buildings were rebuilt or remodelled before the second edition of 1860, by which time the present house appears as a rectangular plan with outbuildings forming three sides of a courtyard to the rear. By the early 19th century the Church Street terrace had become a desirable address, and it could fairly claim to be Banbridge's equivalent of "Harley Street", housing consulting rooms and surgeries for doctors, dentists, and a vet — a function that several properties in the terrace continue to fulfil today as offices for professional people.

The Townland Valuation records number 4 as the property of John, then George Law, described as a house, offices, and yard valued at £24. George Law is listed as an attorney in Pigot's Directory of 1824, and the Belfast Directory of 1841–42 notes that he also maintained a Dublin office in Gardiner Street. The valuation records dimensions for the house and three two-storey outbuildings.

By the time of Griffith's Valuation the Law family had leased the house to William Walker. The valuer describes it as a "very fine", "stone finished" house with "good attics", valuing it at £35 with an additional £1 for the yard and garden. The map and valuation records show the house had by then gained rear returns. William Walker was a local linen merchant who built a power loom factory near Banbridge in 1865; by 1866 Messrs William Walker & Co employed three hundred people. Walker died in 1889 a very wealthy man. His will distributed monetary gifts to a lengthy list of friends and relatives, including many local linen families and the wife of Andrew McClelland, solicitor, who was to become the next resident.

Andrew McClelland took over the house in 1891 and was still in residence at the time of the 1901 census, when he was a 58-year-old solicitor living with his wife, a son who served as his apprentice, and two domestic servants — a cook and a housemaid. By the 1911 census McClelland was still present, now living with a boarder of no stated occupation but retaining a domestic servant. Three of his five children had not survived to maturity, a reminder that high infant mortality rates affected the middle classes as well as the less well-off. A photograph dated 1911 records the former railings and gate piers to the property, which have since been removed.

Subsequent occupiers included H. S. McClelland (1919) and Dr Robert Martin, who purchased the property for £1,500 in 1921. When the house was revalued at £47 in the early 1930s it was being leased by Dr Martin from the Reverend H. B. Eaton. The accommodation at that time comprised a hall, two front reception rooms, a kitchen, two pantries, and a wash house on the ground floor; a surgery, waiting room, bathroom, separate WC, and three front bedrooms on the first floor; and three attic bedrooms above. A rear return housed the surgery, with a coal store beneath, and a glasshouse stood in the garden. The valuer noted that the outbuildings were used only as a garage and that the house was "well kept up and in good condition throughout". Dr Martin was followed by Thomas E. Reade (1937) and Geoffrey A. C. Miller (1949).

A comparison with a photograph taken at the time of the first survey in 1986 shows that the facade has not greatly changed in the intervening period, apart from the replacement of the original 1/1 sliding sash windows with more proportionally appropriate 6/6 windows. The building now provides office accommodation for the sheltered housing development built in the former garden to the rear.