Wetherspoons, The Bridge House, 35-37 Bedford Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT2 7EJ

Former warehouse, now public house, designed by Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon and built in 1868. Located on Bedford Street, close to Belfast city centre, the building sits within a conservation area and has group value with other surviving linen warehouses in the immediate area.

The building is rectangular on plan with a substantial return to the rear, and rises three storeys to an attic. Its pitched natural slate roof is concealed behind a sandstone parapet. Cast iron rainwater goods and stone eaves gutters serve the roofline, and red brick chimneys rise from the gables.

The principal elevation faces east onto Bedford Street and is the architectural showpiece of the building. The walling here is yellow brick laid in Flemish bond, displaying proportions and detailing typical of the Lombardic style with lively Ruskinian polychrome brickwork. A decorative eaves band runs across the facade, comprising two courses of cogged yellow brick sandwiched between bands of red and black brick. The remaining exposed elevations are red brick laid in English garden wall bond.

The upper floors of the principal elevation are symmetrically arranged, with four central windows grouped in pairs and flanked by a single window to each side. Windows to the ground and second floors are round-headed; those to the first floor are segmental-headed. All floors have moulded sandstone sill courses. The upper floor windows have polychrome brick heads interlinked across the central windows, with dentilled red brick banding at impost level. The first-floor and second-floor windows retain their original one-over-one timber sash frames.

The ground floor of the principal elevation has red brick voussoirs to all openings with modern window insertions to either side. To the left is a wide double-door opening with a fixed tympanum. To the right is a door opening with a modern timber door set within an ashlar sandstone reveal with stop-end chamfers and a semi-circular tympanum carved with flowers and leaves surrounding a central blank shield. The lintel is inscribed with the date 1868. Modern-style front entrance doors have been added to the ground floor, detracting somewhat from the original fabric.

The secondary elevations are more plainly detailed. Windows on these faces are modern casement openings set in plain red brick reveals. The south elevation is abutted by an adjoining modern extension of no architectural interest. The rear elevation is abutted by two contiguous perpendicular returns, one slightly lower than the other, with only the north and rear elevations exposed. The rear elevation of the return is skewed and abutted by a modern extension to the right. The ground floor of the rear is cement rendered and blank, except for two large modern delivery access openings to the rear yard. The first floor of the rear has four window openings, two of which have been infilled with concrete blocks. The second floor has two window openings. The north elevation abuts the adjoining building.

The building occupies an urban street-fronted setting south of Belfast city centre. To the south it is abutted by a taller modern extension of inappropriate design. A small concrete service yard to the rear is enclosed by steel security railings. The north side of the building overlooks a private car park accessed via a vehicular entrance arch in the neighbouring building, and is largely concealed from public view. To the north lies a series of 19th century warehouse buildings.

The internal layout has been altered to suit its current use as a public house, though some elements of a typical late Victorian interior survive.

The building dates to 1867–8 and is first shown on the 1871–3 street plan for the area as a warehouse fronting Bedford Street with a carriage archway to the south west. It extends back as far as the course of the Blackstaff River. It was first entered into valuation records in 1868 as a warehouse and yard occupied by Herman Boas & Co, leased from Leadbetter Calder & Co, and initially valued at £180. This was reduced to £165 in 1869 following an appeal, and further reduced to £150 in 1885.

The site occupies a stretch of Bedford Street that had formerly been part of the Old Dublin Road. This area of Belfast was slow to develop, the damp floodplain of the River Blackstaff making the ground unattractive until improvements in drainage made construction feasible. Spinning and weaving factories had colonised the western side of Bedford Street by the time of the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, and the street became a significant centre of linen manufacture and trade. From the mid-19th century, for more than a hundred years, the street was occupied largely by linen manufacturers and ancillary trades, and this building housed one of the last linen businesses to operate in this part of Belfast.

The building was constructed by Lanyon, Lynn and Lanyon as a store for Herman Boas, who traded as Sol Boas, fancy box and linen ornament manufacturer. Herman Boas (1827–1917) was a founding member of the Jewish congregation in Belfast in 1861 and its president in 1877. He also served as Treasurer of the Belfast Hebrew Board of Guardians for many years. Boas had emigrated to Nottingham from Lübeck in 1854 and settled in Belfast in 1861. His Dutch wife, Caroline Spiers, was a niece of the lexicographer Alexander Spiers and an aunt of Herman Heyermans, the Dutch playwright and novelist. Their eldest son, Frederick Samuel Boas (1862–1955), became a distinguished Shakespearean scholar, publishing numerous works on Tudor and Stuart drama and poetry, and served as Professor of English Literature at Queen's College, Belfast from 1901 to 1905. Herman Boas had previously run his business from premises in Donegall Square South before building his own warehouse on a vacant plot in Bedford Street in the 1860s.

By the late 19th century the Boas firm had vacated the building, which was then let floor by floor to a series of businesses using it as warerooms, stores, offices and workrooms. Over subsequent decades a succession of linen, textile and related firms passed through the building, including H J McBride & Sons, linen bleachers with works at Hyde Park (approximately 1897–1922); Joseph Moulds, linen merchant (approximately 1902–1915); J & R Pritchard & Co, handkerchief manufacturers (approximately 1902–1907); JR Cooper Ltd, fancy box manufacturers (approximately 1897–1911); Bedford Hemstitching Company (1908–1911); Clendinning and Gotto, fancy linen manufacturers (1911–1922); William Nicholl, blouse and overall manufacturers (1911–1919); Wesley Roy, paper merchant (1912–1922); W Heney & Co, linen manufacturers (1921–2); and Kirk Partners and Forestbrook Ltd, linen manufacturers, bleachers and finishers.

In 1925 the building was taken over by John Higginson & Co Ltd, cotton piece goods manufacturers, who occupied the premises for the next 45 years. In 1941 they were joined by the Ulster Linen Company, linen manufacturers, and both firms remained until 1970. Despite this being a period of general decline for the linen industry and for Belfast, the building continued to be used by linen manufacturing firms — H Jackson and Co Ltd and the York Street Flax Spinning Company Ltd — until the early 1980s, making it the last of the Bedford Street warehouses to be occupied by linen manufacturers. The building has since been converted to its present use as a public house.