Longhurst, 174 Upper Malone Road, Belfast, BT17 9JZ

Longhurst is an accomplished two-storey-plus-attic Arts and Crafts style detached house, built around 1893 to designs by the London architect Frank Loughborough Pearson. It is set in extensive grounds on an elevated site overlooking the Lagan Valley, and is a particularly fine and largely unaltered example of the substantial late Victorian suburban villa. The house is further distinguished by its pioneering role in the history of domestic electricity in Ireland, having been designed and constructed from the outset with its own independent electricity supply.

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The house is substantial and L-shaped on plan, built in an eclectic blend of styles rooted in the English vernacular. Asymmetry, sweeping roofs and carefully considered detailing are all characteristic of the Arts and Crafts genre, and all are much in evidence here. The house is replete with high-quality handmade materials: handmade bricks, expanses of decorative geometric tile-hung walling with bell-cast detail, and leaded windows set in stone, metal and timber framing, generally positioned forward within the window reveals.

The roofscape is expansive, with swept overhanging eaves interspersed by clipped eaves over framed window openings. The hipped roofs are covered in handmade Rosemary clay red tiles and are enlivened by dormered gables, which express the primacy of plan form over symmetry and admit light to the attic rooms. Expressive moulded brickwork includes a notable three-stage star-shaped chimney stack, inglenook-flanking window arrangements, and further moulded brick chimneys that enliven the roofscape and modulate the facades. The judicious massing of elements — including the yard walling that joins the servant's wing to the main house — creates a composite and picturesque silhouette on the approach to the dwelling. Carved sandstone is used to good effect, most notably in the entrance porch in Queen Anne style and in a handsome garden bay in ashlar stonework that frames the views across the landscaped garden. Date-marked hoppers, cast metal downpipes and a dated cast metal weathervane, all bearing the date 1893, add further interest to the roofscape.

ENTRANCE ELEVATION (NORTH-WEST)

The site is entered through a timber gate flanked by two brick piers. The principal two-storey forecourt facade is faced with geometric tile hanging to the upper storey over red brick at ground level, with the exception of the stairwell, which is expressed in brick to its full height. The main entrance porch, asymmetrically positioned on this elevation, is detailed in crisp Queen Anne style in sandstone, with fluted sandstone pilasters and moulded egg-and-dart enrichment above, and a curved archway in a muted Gibbsian style of rustication. The original oak door features incised carving of intricate fan patterning with panelling below, all set in an oak door frame, with original door handles, bells and historic windows to either side. Windows on this elevation are all historic and are set at varying heights, with fenestration arranged to suit the function of each room. The original single-storey curved brick wall enclosing the courtyard forms an attractive screen against the two-storey main elevation, with a gablet roof over the single-storey servant's quarter set back from the main massing. The covered loggia in the courtyard is accessed via a 12-panel timber door.

SOUTH-WEST ELEVATION

The tile-hung upper storey continues above a red brick ground floor, with historic windows set flush within the reveals and sandstone surrounds. A string course at window sill level continues along this elevation. A large three-stage star-shaped brick chimney stack, capped with clay chimney pots and with stepping chimney shoulders, dominates the facade, with a pair of small windows flanking the inglenook. A notable alteration on this elevation is the removal of the original sunroom, which has been replaced by a timber structure.

REAR ELEVATION (SOUTH-EAST)

The attic gable to the rear is half-timbered with two small windows to the centre in a simple quadrant pattern, admitting light to the attic. Many original details survive, including a corner window to the upper storey of the right-hand block, cast iron rainwater goods, and the dated weathervane with 1893 incised in metal. A curved single-storey bay features fenestration set in stone mullions with lead cladding to the roof. A string course forms the window sill detail and unifies the materials and composition. Patterned stained glass windows in fixed lights survive above, though the lower windows on this elevation have been replaced with uPVC units; further uPVC replacement windows have been inserted in similar proportions to the originals on original stone sills. A new sunroom now replaces the former porch at the centre of this composition. The rear elevation gives onto a garden terrace with brick walling and steps providing access to the lower terrace and lawns, affording views across the landscape.

NORTH-EAST ELEVATION

This elevation retains an original corner window with timber surrounds to the upper storey. A sandstone archway at the centre of the elevation has a stepped entrance to a set-back hardwood door with a two-by-three arrangement of symmetrical frosted windows. Painted red cast iron rainwater goods and a hopper dated 1893 survive. Towards the right-hand block, brick utilitarian storage units enclose a courtyard space. This elevation retains historic windows, cast iron rainwater goods and the tiled roof.

INTERIOR

The principal rooms at Longhurst are notable for the absence of ceiling roses. Although it is possible these once existed and were removed, ceiling roses were conventionally used to conceal smuts from oil and gas lighting and may have been deliberately omitted here because electricity — a clean source of light — was used from the outset. The current owner reports that electricity wires laid in pitch, an early form of insulation, were discovered during rewiring works. Ducts at ceiling level in some of the main rooms are the readable remains of an unusual ventilating system, possibly also used for heating, with the generating equipment likely having powered it. Generous spaces beneath the floorboards may also have been designed as part of this system.

One of the most unusual features of the interior is a double wall separating the former laboratory from the former dining room. The distance between the two walls varies but amounts to several feet at its maximum; the area between them is at least partially open, with an access hatch within the former verandah. This space is thought to have functioned as a coal bunker, and the double wall likely also enclosed generous flues for the cellar engine and the ventilation system. It also incidentally provided a buffer between Brown's experiments and the main living rooms. The cellar retains evidence of its former use as an engine room, including numerous ducts and openings (some now blocked), and a coal chute accessible from the front of the house.

The valuer's report of 1935 records that by that date the walls dividing the dining room from the drawing room, and the former laboratory from the workshop, had already been removed, opening out the main rooms at the front of the house. Much of the internal detailing survives intact, including woodwork, some door furniture, floors and fireplaces.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The house was designed by Frank Loughborough Pearson of London for John Brown, a scientist and pioneer of battery science, domestic technology and motoring. It was built in 1893 on a site purchased by Brown as part of the former demesne of Lismoyne House — built by banker Robert Caldwell in the late 18th century and demolished in the 1970s. Brown purchased over 36 acres of the demesne from the Caldwell family, together with an existing mid-19th century gate lodge to Lismoyne House, which he adopted as the gate lodge to Longhurst. That gate lodge survives as a separately listed building but was sold off in the 1950s. Longhurst first entered valuation records in 1894 as a house, offices, gate lodge and land, leased from Lady Harriet Ashley, daughter of the Marquis of Donegall, with the buildings valued at £54. The house is first shown by name on the 1901 Ordnance Survey map, and was described in Young's Belfast and the Province of Ulster of 1909 as designed in the style of the smaller manor houses of the 16th century found in the Home Counties.

Pearson's designs for the house were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1893 and a watercolour view of the garden elevation, together with a sketch plan of the ground floor, was reproduced in The Architect in September 1893 under the title 'House at Lismoyne near Belfast'. A comparison of the 1909 photograph of the house with Pearson's original watercolour suggests that the original intention was for all or most of the windows to be stone mullioned; this was never fully enacted, and only the bow window to the former drawing room features stone mullions. The original design also shows straight walls to the rear yard, whereas the yard is in fact enclosed by a curved wall, perhaps for a more aesthetically pleasing approach to the entrance.

FRANK LOUGHBOROUGH PEARSON (1864–1947)

Frank Loughborough Pearson was a London architect active in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. He was articled with his father, the highly distinguished ecclesiastical architect John Loughborough Pearson — who is interred in Westminster Abbey — from 1882, becoming a partner in 1890. Together they worked on projects including the Astor Estate Office until his father's death in 1897. Frank subsequently completed a number of projects begun by or with his father, most notably Truro and Wakefield Cathedrals and St Bartholomew's Church, Nottingham. In his own right, Frank Pearson is known for several ecclesiastical buildings including the chancel and aisle of St Alban the Martyr, Middlesbrough, Yorkshire (1902); the chancel and chapel of Wakefield Cathedral (1904); St Matthew's, Auckland, New Zealand (1904); the Convent School of St Nicholas and St Helen's Church, Abingdon, Berkshire (1904); and the chancel of St Augustine's Church, Rugeley, Staffordshire (1905). He also designed commercial premises for the music publishers Novello in Wardour Street, London (1908); estate buildings for Hever Castle in Kent (1908); a memorial gateway for Winchester College, Hampshire (1909); and a memorial fountain at the Children's Hospital, Great Ormond Street, London (1910). His interior detailing — including decorative woodwork, panelling and mosaics at Cliveden, St Peter's Home in Woking, and Fitzrovia Chapel — is also notable. The design for Longhurst came relatively early in Pearson's career and is his only known work in Ireland. It is not clear how Pearson came to design the house; Brown travelled widely throughout the United Kingdom and further afield, while Pearson is known to have had Isle of Man connections.

JOHN BROWN — DOMESTIC TECHNOLOGY PIONEER

John Brown (1850–1911) was a scientist whose principal field was experimental electrochemistry and battery science. At the time Longhurst was built, he was a widower with two young sons, and his independent financial means enabled him to have his house designed in accordance with his own scientific interests. Longhurst was constructed with a laboratory and workshop contained within it — an arrangement that allowed Brown to use the domestic electricity supply for his experiments and inventions as well as for heating and lighting.

Before the introduction of power stations, electric lighting was generally the preserve of companies and wealthy individuals able to afford their own generating equipment, and was initially applied mainly to commercial, industrial and street lighting. The first private houses in the north of Ireland to be retrofitted with electricity were Milford House, Armagh (1870, though it is unclear whether this was used for lighting) and Crawfordsburn, where hydroelectric machinery was installed in 1886. Mains electricity was not available to private houses in the Belfast area until the opening of the first electric light station in Belfast, at Chapel Lane, in 1895, and even then only to certain streets in and around the city centre. Longhurst is therefore likely to be among the first houses in Ireland to have been constructed — rather than retrofitted — with electric lighting. For comparison, Standen in West Sussex is thought to be among the first country houses in Britain to be built with electric light, completed in 1894.

Brown's electrical system would have required a generator, probably either a heavy oil engine (commercially available from 1892) or a coke-fired producer gas generator and gas engine driving a dynamo, with this machinery most likely housed in the cellar. The dynamo charged lead-acid accumulators located in a small room near the kitchen, probably the room adjacent to the back stairs.

The generating equipment is also thought to have powered the house's unusual ventilating system, possibly also used for heating. In 1891, Brown had presented his ideas on assisting domestic ventilation by pressing air into the house rather than relying on fireplaces and chimneys to draw it out. The remains of this system are still readable in the house today, in the form of ducts at ceiling level in some of the main rooms.

In a paper given to the Belfast Natural History and Philosophical Society on his inauguration as its president in 1900, Brown stated that at Longhurst they employed, besides electric lighting, eight electric motors and five pieces of apparatus in which electric heating was used. The electrically powered domestic appliances he operated included a mangle, an ice-making machine and a meat chopper — very early experimental versions of modern kitchen appliances. Brown also adapted an electrical reciprocating apparatus, which he patented in 1900, to beat eggs while oil was added in order to produce an excellent mayonnaise. Despite these labour-saving devices, and in line with contemporary practice, the 1901 census records that the Browns employed two servants: a cook and a housemaid.

In September 1902, Brown hosted a garden party at Longhurst during the prestigious annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Belfast. Guests included Professor G H Darwin, son of Charles Darwin; Lord Rayleigh, who later won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1904; and Colonel Crompton, a major figure in the early history of electric lighting. The party crossed the Lagan to Longhurst by means of an ingeniously constructed ferry of Brown's own invention, worked by pulleys and weights. At Longhurst they examined his electrical laboratory — described as having a place for everything and everything in its own place — were shown Viagraphs in his workshop (see below), and witnessed strange and new applications of electric motive power to domestic appliances in his kitchen, including an automatic arrangement for testing the water level in the cisterns. An outdoor fountain was in full play (visible in the 1909 image of the house), and an electrically powered lawnmower was an object of great curiosity.

JOHN BROWN — SCIENTIST AND INVENTOR

John Brown was the eldest son of John Shaw Brown (1822–1887), linen manufacturer and builder of the St Ellen linen works at Edenderry, just across the Lagan from Longhurst. The Brown family lived at Edenderry House from 1866. John Brown was educated at RBAI, ostensibly for a career in commerce, but from an early age displayed scientific inclinations. He went on to study at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Bonn, Germany — at the time one of the foremost centres in the natural sciences — before becoming a partner in the family firm. He married Mary Kertland of Queenstown in 1880, but his wife died of puerperal fever in 1882 after the birth of their second child. In the same year (some sources say 1885) Brown retired from the linen business to concentrate full-time on scientific research.

Brown's first papers on the theory of voltaic action — that is, battery science — were published in the Philosophical Magazine in 1878 and 1879, and his 1878 experiment was cited by the celebrated physicist James Clerk Maxwell (1831–1879) in his authoritative Elementary Treatise on Electricity. The work that has attracted the most enduring interest is his 1888 paper on Figures Produced by Electric Action on Photographic Dry Plates, which was widely discussed in the contemporary photographic and scientific press and was cited in later literature on lightning; the images were displayed at Queen's University Belfast in 2024 as part of an exhibition on electrification. Brown was not infallible, however, and he rejected some theories — such as electrolytic dissociation — now accepted as foundational, leaving his understanding of electrochemical processes incomplete.

Brown was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1902, a major scientific honour and an endorsement of the quality and originality of his work by his peers. His obituary appeared in Nature, in itself a considerable accolade, describing him as a scientific amateur in the best sense of the word.

Brown was granted at least nine patents between 1885 and 1905, the majority relating to automotive transport and railways. These included a design for a motor car chassis intended to be safer, easier to clean and more aesthetically pleasing than contemporary vehicles (GB 12157, 1896); a vehicle wheel with spring spokes (GB 7692, 1902); an electrical reciprocating apparatus capable of producing a back-and-forth or rotary motion for purposes ranging from beating eggs to drilling rocks (GB 7861, 1900; US 684906, 1901); and a continuously moving electric train from which carriages would disconnect to collect passengers before reconnecting to a following train, for which Brown had a working model made and which was patented in both Great Britain and the United States (GB 20887, 1900; US 694129, 1902). His most notable invention, however, was the Viagraph (GB 9123, 1898), the first known device for evaluating the roughness of road surfaces. The Viagraph gave its name, and perhaps some of its mechanical principles, to devices used particularly in the United States and France into at least the 1970s, and appears to be the only one of Brown's inventions to have gone into production, manufactured by Glenfield & Kennedy of Kilmarnock.

JOHN BROWN — IRELAND'S FIRST MOTORIST

Brown had a deep interest in the development of automotive power and had a car shipped from France, which arrived at Longhurst on 6th March 1896 — the first motor car having been imported to England only in June 1895, also from France. It was believed at the time, and no contradictory evidence has since come to light, that this was the first motor car to be brought into Ireland, making John Brown Ireland's first motorist. The car was a Serpollet steam motor car with driving gear similar to that of a tricycle, an engine under the seat, and a steam generator at the rear consisting of steel tubes heated by a coke fire, converting water to steam instantaneously. A few weeks after its arrival, Brown gave a lecture at the Ulster Hall Annexe entitled Automobiles or Horseless Carriages, at which the car was exhibited with its engine running. A photograph of Brown in the car with his son William, taken in the grounds of Longhurst, survives.

Following his purchase of the Serpollet, Brown designed his own car — for the chassis and wheels of which he submitted patents — powered by electric batteries, addressing some of the shortcomings he had identified in the Serpollet. He likened the vehicle to a sleigh, or an electric street boat; it had a range of 20 miles and a top speed of around six miles per hour. It was built between 1897 and 1900 and is depicted outside Longhurst in a surviving photograph. The first electric car had been built in Germany in 1888, and although electric cars were generating increasing interest by 1900, such a vehicle would still have been a considerable novelty in Ireland at the time.

Brown's interest in roads and motoring endured throughout his life. He was the founding President of the Irish Roads Improvement Association and used his invention, the Viagraph, to press — with some success — for roads better suited to the needs of the motor car. John Brown lived at Longhurst until his death at the age of 61 in 1911.

SUBSEQUENT RESIDENTS

The next known resident was Robert P Corry, son of Robert William Corry, co-founder of the firm of James P Corry & Co Ltd, timber, slate, tile and cement importers. Robert P Corry chose a different path and became a partner in Fiddes, Todd & Corry Ltd, linen merchants; he and his partner George Todd sold the business and retired in 1921.

An outdoor rifle range was constructed on the property in 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, initially used by the Malone and Balmoral Miniature Rifle Club. It was still being used for shooting competitions as late as 1929.

From at least 1934, the house was occupied by Mr and Mrs Roland M Byers, who occasionally let it to others. Roland M Byers was chairman of Corran Works Ltd of Larne, a subsidiary of the Pye Radio Company, and was involved in building television stations in Northern Ireland. He reached the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel during the Second World War and was appointed Deputy Lieutenant for Belfast in 1951. Mrs Byers was the daughter of Sir Milne Barbour Bt MP, himself a motoring pioneer who drove a steam-powered Locomobile and whose driving licence, dated 1st January 1904 — the first day on which driving licences were required by law — was donated to the Ulster Automobile Club. A valuer's inspection for the Third General Revaluation of the 1930s found the house in excellent order with modernised bathrooms, and the report of 1935 records that by that time the walls between the dining room and drawing room, and between the former laboratory and workshop, had already been removed. The upper floor accommodation at this time comprised four bedrooms, a bathroom and an en suite, together with three further bedrooms and a bathroom for the maids. The stables were used for the Byers' horses and ponies, including racehorses.

The house was offered for sale in 1952 — by which time it had been connected to the mains electricity supply — and was sold in 1953 for £13,000 to Ernest Reid, a consultant engineer who had overseen the construction of Langford Lodge aerodrome near Aldergrove, occupied by the United States Air Force during the Second World War, and who had also supervised the construction of many other wartime airfields in Britain. Reid began the process of parcelling up the land to the west of Longhurst for development; at that time the house stood in approximately 36 acres extending to the Upper Malone Road, an area that has since been fully developed, with around two dozen substantial dwellings constructed.

After Ernest Reid's death, Longhurst was sold for £8,550 in 1958 to Mr and Mrs John Graham. John Graham was a racehorse owner; his son, who also lived at Longhurst, was a racing driver. The Grahams ran a chinchilla breeding business at Longhurst.

By 1965, Mr A Eric Martin and Mrs Jean Martin had moved in. Mr Martin was chairman of H & J Martin Ltd and Martin Estates Co Ltd, and also chairman of the Construction Industry Training Board Northern Ireland. He was at various times President and chairman of Belfast Savings Bank, President of the Belfast Builders' Association and a governor of RBAI, and was awarded the OBE in 1969. The Martins remained in the house until at least the mid-1980s.

The adjacent stables were jointly owned by Messrs Jordan and Martin and were run from the late 1960s by a series of managers as a riding school, known initially as Longhurst Riding Establishment and renamed Lagan Valley Equestrian Centre in 1984. The Centre has since been demolished and the site redeveloped for housing.

ALTERATIONS AND CURRENT CONDITION

Longhurst retains its original external appearance with its eclectic Arts and Crafts detailing largely intact. Some windows have been altered, with limited replacement of glass and frames. A chimney at the east end of the house has been removed. The house also retains its original footprint, with the notable exceptions of the loss of the conservatory to the west elevation and the construction of a sunroom in recent years around the former verandah on the south elevation. The original outbuilding block to the north of the house was demolished between 1920 and 1931. Internally, the original plan form is largely intact, with the exception of the removal of the partition walls dividing the principal living rooms, which had already taken place by 1935. Much of the internal detailing — including woodwork, some door furniture, floors and fireplaces — remains intact. Although the fabric and machinery of the original electricity supply are now largely gone, several traces of the pioneering technology survive in the fabric of the building, including the cellar with its ducts, openings and coal chute, and the remnants of the ventilation system.

SETTING

The setting of Longhurst, although much reduced from the original parkland demesne, remains mature and well screened. It continues to provide the critical views to the south-east that the house was originally orientated to enjoy. The house is accessed via a private lane from the Upper Malone Road through the original gate lodge to Lismoyne, which is separately listed. The original single-storey curved brick wall enclosing the forecourt courtyard survives, forming an attractive screen to the main two-storey entrance elevation.