St Malachy's Convent, Sussex Place, Belfast, BT2 8LN

St Malachy's Convent is a former religious house built around 1880 to designs by Alexander McAlister (1821–1897), one of the leading Catholic architects in Victorian Belfast. Construction began in 1879 and was completed by 1880, with building work carried out by contractors J & J Guiler, who operated from offices on Great Victoria Street. The convent is attached to a former redbrick schoolhouse and together the pair occupy a prominent corner site within St Malachy's parish in Belfast city centre, close to St Malachy's Church. The building retains a large proportion of its original fabric, having had no change of use since it ceased to function as a religious house in recent years.

ARCHITECTURE

The convent is a symmetrical three-storey building with attic, three bays wide, built in a relatively plain Venetian Gothic style enlivened by modest stone detailing. The plan is rectangular with a full-height return, and the walling is English garden wall bonded red brick.

The pitched roof is covered in natural slate and features dormers, angled ridge tiles, cement skew tables, and redbrick gable chimneystacks with corbelled stone caps. Ogee cast-iron gutters run over exposed rafter tails.

The principal elevation faces south and is the most ornate. It has a central breakfront rising to a steep pointed gable at attic level, topped by a Celtic cross finial with kneelers. Each floor has three paired openings with Gothic arched windows, except at the centre of the ground floor, where the entrance is formed by a timber panelled door with the top three panels glazed. This door sits within a painted brick and stucco Gothic surround and is flanked by half-colonnettes with ornate foliate capitals; similar ornate stops are carried through to the architrave. Above the door a pointed arched transom light sits over a moulded lintel, which supports a statuette of St Malachy. The threshold is laid with coloured tiles incorporating a central cross motif.

Throughout the building, windows are formed as paired Gothic arches with 1/1 timber sashes with horns, set in chamfered sandstone surrounds. Sandstone platbands run at window arch springing level and at cill level on each floor of the principal and east elevations.

The west gable is abutted by the former National School. The rear elevation is enclosed by a yard and is abutted at ground floor level by a one-and-a-half storey lean-to extension and a later flat-roofed abutment. Fenestration to the rear is irregular, with wide margin-paned lights at the centre of each floor lighting the stairwell; all rear windows have brick arched heads.

The east gable is extended by the east elevation of the return, which is lit by a dormer at attic level. The ground floor of the east elevation has paired windows to the right and a single window to the left, all with stained and leaded glazing. There are three windows to the first floor, two to the second floor, and a blind niche at the gable apex.

SETTING

The building occupies a corner site within an urban streetscape, with early 19th century terraces to the north and east and modern housing to the south. The entrance is set back within a small garden enclosure planted with shrubs and paved, bounded by a steel fence and accessed through a small pedestrian gate. An earlier brick wall that originally enclosed the front garden was removed at some point before the building was first surveyed in 1988.

HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

The Sisters of Mercy, who originated in Dublin and arrived in Belfast in 1854, had established a girls' school at 15 Hamilton Street by 1858 and were residing in a rented house in Alfred Street before the convent was built. The foundation stone of the convent was laid in July 1879, and the building opened on 19th March 1880 — the feast day of St Joseph, in whose honour it was named St Joseph's Convent of Mercy.

The adjoining National School, originally known as the Bowen School for Young Ladies after Matthew Bowen, proprietor of the Royal Hotel in Donegall Place, who funded its construction, was designed by Timothy Hevey (1846–1878) and opened in 1878. It was also administered by the Sisters of Mercy and had opened by 1880.

By 1901 the convent was recorded in street directories under its full name, St Joseph's Convent of Mercy, with Sister Mary Genevieve as Mother Superior. The Census Building Return of that year described the convent and adjoining schoolhouse as a first-class building containing 14 rooms; by 1911 this had grown to 20 rooms. From 1907 to 1918, the Sisters of Mercy at Sussex Place were led by Mother Superior Sister Mary Frances Kirwan.

The Annual Revisions initially valued the convent at £40 in 1879, a figure maintained until 1905 when it rose to £65 following the separate valuation of the Cromac area. The convent chapel was recorded separately from around 1905 and valued at £18; neither valuation changed before the Annual Revisions ended in 1930. The first general revaluation of property in Northern Ireland in 1935 recalculated the convent's value at £130. Both the convent and the adjoining school escaped major damage during the Belfast Blitz in the spring of 1941, despite the Markets area sustaining heavy damage during the Luftwaffe raids on the nearby shipyards. A revaluation in 1956 set the value at £190, which was reduced to £152 under the 1957 Rent and Valuation Act, remaining at that level until the end of the second general revaluation in 1972.

An interesting personal connection exists between the building and its architect: Alexander McAlister was a devout Catholic, and two of his daughters later joined the Sisters of Mercy, though it is not known whether they were based at Sussex Place. McAlister also designed St Malachy's School on Oxford Street and St Matthew's Parish Church in Ballymacarrett.

The Sisters of Mercy continued to occupy the site until the late 1960s, by which time their numbers had declined to the point that only two nuns remained in the building in 1969. A decision was then made to close the convent on a trial basis during the summer, when the school was not in use; the remaining sisters were relocated to a convent on the Crumlin Road but continued to travel daily to teach in the schoolhouse. The Sisters of Mercy did not return to Sussex Place. An outbreak of civil unrest led to a decline in the numbers of children attending St Joseph's School, and it was not until 1983 that the convent was reoccupied, this time by the Good Shepherd Sisters.

In 2008 the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society included St Malachy's School and Convent in its list of buildings at risk in Belfast, noting that the pair forms part of an important grouping in the Linen Conservation Area, helping to retain a distinctive sense of place. At that time, the former National School had been acquired in 2006 by the Belfast Buildings Preservation Trust, which carried out holding repairs; the school has since been used as a boxing club, while the convent has continued to lie vacant.

The building has group value with the adjacent former National School and contributes significantly to the ecclesiastical character of this part of Belfast city centre, which is dominated by the nearby St Malachy's Church. It is of social importance as a former religious house and represents social and cultural interest in the Markets area.