Morrison's Lounge Bar, 21 Bedford Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT2 7EJ

Morrison's Lounge Bar is a symmetrical five-bay, three-storey-with-attic terraced red-brick public house in the Lombardic style, built in 1871 to designs by architect John Boyd. It stands on the west side of Bedford Street in Belfast city centre, north of the junction with Ormeau Avenue and south of the City Hall, on a major urban thoroughfare. Originally constructed as a linen warehouse for William Ferguson, linen merchant, it incorporates the adjoining properties at numbers 23–25. The building is one of a number of 19th-century linen warehouses that characterise the social and economic development of Belfast during the Victorian era, and it makes a significant positive contribution to the character and group value of the terrace as a whole.

The building is rectangular on plan with a bowed front façade. The roof is pitched natural slate with yellow brick chimneystacks. Cast-iron ogee rainwater goods sit on projecting masonry eaves, which are decorated with an arcaded Lombardic frieze eaves course. The walling is Flemish-bonded red brick with yellow brick dressings, and there is a dog-tooth string course to the second-floor windows at impost level. Windows are segmental and round-headed two-over-two timber-framed sliding sash replacements, set in yellow brick chamfered surrounds with ornamented painted masonry keystones and corner stones, and projecting painted masonry sills.

The principal elevation faces east and is symmetrically arranged, with two windows to either side of a gabled entrance bay. A traditional-style pub-front has been added to the ground floor in response to the building's change of use. A double-height recess rises from the first-floor sill course, embracing a loggia-style window with a corbelled and dentilled plinth, and an oculus above with a carved head to the keystone. The entrance is formed by a double-leaf raised-and-fielded six-panel door with a segmental-headed transom light, set within a decorative painted masonry lugged surround with a moulded architrave. The south elevation abuts the adjoining listed building. The west, or rear, elevation — which is of no architectural interest, having modern interventions — has a panelled timber door and one window to each floor at the far right, with corrugated tin cladding to the upper floors at the left. The north elevation abuts the adjoining building to that side. A tarmacadamed alley runs to the rear.

Architectural detailing is largely intact, with some sympathetic restoration carried out over the years. It is noted that the chimneystacks at the gable of number 21 formerly carried a group of tall castellated yellow clay pots, which were removed during the construction of number 19. A neo-Victorian shopfront was inserted into the ground floor of the building around 1990 under the supervision of architect Terence McCaw.

Bedford Street itself was a new road laid out in the 1850s on land formerly known as McLean's fields, named after Adam McLean, a linen draper and property developer who acquired the area between 1805 and 1826. The low-lying site, on the floodplain of the River Blackstaff, was slow to develop, but following drainage of the area, spinning and weaving factories had colonised the western side of the street by the time of the second-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858. The current warehouses are first shown on the Belfast street map of 1871–3. They first appear in valuation records in the period between 1863 and 1881, though the initial entry is undated.

The first recorded occupiers of number 21 were William L. and Henry H. Bell & Co, bleachers, who leased the warehouse from William Ferguson at a valuation of £135. William Stewart & Son, linen and cambric manufacturers, followed in 1882, and the valuation was reduced to £115 in 1884, probably following an appeal. That same year management of the property passed to John Ferguson & Co, later described in the 1880s as "among the oldest and most respectable concerns engaged in the Ulster linen trade, having been founded more than a century ago by an ancestor of the present proprietor." By 1893, the Greenmount Spinning Company, linen manufacturers of Harold's Cross, Dublin, had taken occupation, and the valuation was raised to £160 the same year, perhaps as a result of improvements to the property. Harris Adair & Co, linen manufacturers, then occupied the premises from 1908 until the building was requisitioned by the government in 1941. After the war, the textile trade continued in Bedford Street: H. Gryffe and Co Ltd, hemstitchers, occupied the warehouse from 1944, followed by H. M. Smyth & Co Ltd, linen manufacturers, from 1947, sharing the premises with Glen Linen Company (linen, rayon and cotton manufacturers) and Derryville Hemstitching Company. George Conn & Co, cotton piece goods manufacturers, joined them in 1952. From the late 1950s, textile occupation began to decline, and by 1958 only Smyth & Co and Derryville Hemstitching remained, joined now by telephone, engineering and electrical contractors — an early sign of Belfast's economic shift towards light engineering and service industries. By the mid-1960s the building was vacant, and nearly a century of association with linen manufacture had come to an end. In 1966 it was taken over by J. D. Nicholl & Co Ltd, auctioneers, and in more recent years it has been refurbished for use as a public house.