27-37 TALBOT ST., BELFAST

27-37 Talbot Street is a four-storey former warehouse and bonded store built in 1903-04 to designs by Belfast architects Blackwood & Jury. It stands on the south side of Talbot Street in Belfast's Cathedral Quarter, directly facing the south-east side façade of St Anne's Cathedral. The building is a good example of a turn-of-the-twentieth-century commercial warehouse in the Queen Anne Revival style, and contributes positively to the setting of the Cathedral Conservation Area.

EXTERIOR

The pitched roof is covered in natural slate, hipped to the west, with a raised coping between the building's two sections and modern rooflights. Rainwater goods are uPVC. The walls are red brick laid in English garden wall bond, with sandstone parapet coping, cornice, keystones and cills.

The front (north) elevation is thirteen windows wide, arranged in a pattern of 1/2/2/2/1/4/1 bays. Full-height bullnose brick pilasters define the bays; some of these corbel outwards to form octagonal piers at parapet level, and all piers carry brick pendants with moulded terracotta stops. Brick string courses run over the lintels on each floor. The parapet is scalloped and rises to form a Dutch gable with an exaggerated stone keystone, splayed brickwork to the outer and inner arches, and a panel below of patterned diaper terracotta. Stone finials sit on the scalloped parapet. Together, these elements — the Dutch gable, scalloped parapet, and decorative terracotta — are characteristic Queen Anne Revival features that give the façade much of its architectural character.

Window treatment varies by floor. On the second and third floors, windows have flat arches with bullnosed surrounds and continuous projecting cills. On the first floor, windows are arched with exaggerated keystones, bullnosed surrounds, and flush cills. On the ground floor, windows and doors have segmental arches with bullnosed reveals and flush cills. The windows throughout are timber replacements with two- or three-pane top-hung sashes; ground floor windows and doors are metal replacements.

The east elevation is abutted and obscured by a modern building. The rear south elevation is staggered; each of three sections is three windows wide, with segmental arched openings in bullnosed brick. Some openings have French windows fitted with modern tubular metal glazed balconettes, and the windows here are two- or four-pane casements. The west elevation is fully abutted by a modern building.

SETTING

The building sits directly on the south side of Talbot Street, a narrow street, opposite St Anne's Cathedral. Despite the narrowness of the street, the building is also visible from a greater distance across the car park to the rear of the Cathedral.

HISTORY

Before the present warehouse was built, the site at nos 27-37 Talbot Street was occupied by a number of smaller individual commercial properties. The street directory for 1880 records a wood turner, a carpenter, tailors, and a plasterer among the occupants. The Belfast Revaluation of 1900 confirms that six buildings then stood on the site; the valuer noted they were 'old' — a designation generally applied to buildings dating from at least the early 19th century — and valued them at between £6 and £8 each.

Talbot Street itself was laid out as part of the town-planning scheme initiated by Lord Donegall in the late 18th century, which also established Donegall Street, Church Street, and Academy Street along their present alignments. The development of Talbot Street was carried out by Roger Mulholland in the 1780s, and the street takes its name from a Mr Talbot who served as Donegall's agent in Belfast. By the mid-19th century the street had acquired a reputation as a working-class area associated with social problems; in 1853 the Reverend William O'Hanlon wrote of the Talbot Street area that "spirit stores meet you at every turn … some of them most imposing establishments — and all of them driving a brisk and profitable trade in the material of ruin … let us think of the fatal effects of such a deluge as this through the households of the poor and we shall cease to wonder at the social degradation and vice that prevail."

The new warehouse was advertised as being "built to suit intending tenants, either as warerooms, stores or factory etc." Construction commenced around March 1903 and was completed by March 1904. The building first appeared in the Annual Revisions in 1908, when it was valued at £360 and in use by Young King & Co., a local distillery company, as a bonded store — though the 1908 directory records that the company used it specifically for dry goods storage. Young King & Co. also held offices at the now-demolished nos 32-76 Talbot Street. In 1912 the rateable value was reduced to £330 following a successful appeal against the higher rating.

Young King & Co. vacated the building in 1924, after which it was leased to W. W. Kennedy & Co., a carrier and removals firm that had previously operated from nearby Academy Street. In 1927 W. W. Kennedy & Co. sublet part of the premises — nos 33-37 — to William Campbell & Co., brass founders and finishers formerly of nos 6-26 Talbot Street, while retaining nos 27-31 themselves. The total rateable value was reduced to £302 that year as a result of this subdivision. W. W. Kennedy & Co. left nos 27-31 in 1930, and the soft drinks manufacturers Hollywood & Donnelly took over that portion the same year, bringing the total value of the building up to £379.

By the time of the First General Revaluation of property in Northern Ireland in 1935, the half formerly occupied by William Campbell & Co. was lying empty, while Hollywood & Donnelly continued in the other half; the total value under the revaluation had risen to £490. Due to disruption caused by the Second World War, no further revaluation was carried out for over two decades. By the 1950s, Hollywood & Donnelly had expanded to occupy nos 31-33, while the Daily Mirror used nos 35-37 as a warehouse. Hollywood & Donnelly vacated in 1964 after more than three decades of occupation. Tenants changed several times in the years that followed, and by the end of the Second General Revaluation in 1972 the total value of the warehouse had fallen to £312.

The building was listed in 1990, at which time it was in use as office space. Writing in 1993, Patton described it as a "four-storey redbrick warehouse with bullnose reveals to opes," and suggested that, given the visible division of the building into two distinct sections — one with a scalloped pediment and capped stone finials, the other with wavy gables above a brick diaper pattern — it was "apparently built in two stages." In more recent years the ground floor was used as a restaurant known as No. 27 Talbot Street, which closed in 2012. At the time of listing the ground floor was occupied by an Indian restaurant, Mumbai 27, while the upper floors had been converted into private flats by Helm Housing.