Telephone House, 45-75 May Street, BELFAST, BT1 4SJ, County Antrim

Telephone House, 45–75 May Street, Belfast

Telephone House is a symmetrical, detached, multi-bay, six-storey telephone exchange building with an attic storey, constructed between 1932 and 1935 to designs by Thomas Francis O. Rippingham, an architect with the Ministry of Finance from 1922 until around 1956. It was Northern Ireland's first automatic telephone exchange, and its Art Deco style and scale are unique in Northern Ireland. The building is planned around a central courtyard, faces east, and occupies a corner site at the junction of May Street and Cromac Street. A seven-storey block added around 1970 abuts the rear elevation.

Exterior

The walling is grey brick laid in Flemish bond, with pre-cast concrete vertical and horizontal bands and granite ashlar at ground floor level. The attic storey is set back behind a grey brick parapet wall with steel railing, and is covered by a sheeted steel roof.

The symmetrical east-facing front elevation is ten windows wide. It has a grey brick parapet wall with a projecting brick string course and a series of alternating segmental-headed and diminutive square-headed window openings below. From the first to fourth floors, windows are recessed and arranged in vertical compositions, with stepped pre-cast concrete lintels to the fourth floor and pre-cast concrete panels below each window bearing an electrical design — a zig-zag motif characteristic of Art Deco and also evocative of the building's function as a receiver and transmitter of telephone signals, conventionally represented as zig-zag lines. The windows are arranged in three pairs divided by pre-cast concrete pilasters and flanked by further vertical series of slender windows. At ground floor, the granite ashlar walling carries a central doorcase flanked by a symmetrical composition of five blind windows to either side, all with splayed sills to a granite plinth course. The square-headed door opening has hardwood double-leaf panelled doors set within a plain granite ashlar surround with raised lettering reading "TELEPHONE HOUSE", and a recessed granite surround with a flat voussoired granite arch bearing a carved royal coat of arms. The coat of arms was carved by Morris Harding, an English sculptor also commissioned to carve symbolic devices on the columns and corbels of St Anne's Cathedral.

The south side elevation is twelve windows wide and is detailed in the same manner as the front elevation. The north side elevation is also twelve windows wide, detailed identically to the front elevation, and fronts onto May Street. The rear elevation is largely abutted by the seven-storey block of around 1970, though a single bay of the original rear elevation remains exposed where the later block is set back from May Street. The same architectural detailing is carried through to the internal courtyard, where many of the original steel casement windows are retained. Throughout the building, windows in the main elevations are replacement powder-coated steel.

Although originally intended to have walls of Mourne granite, the expense was prohibitive and granite was confined to a band at sixth floor level and at the base. Ruabon bricks of a silver-grey tone were used for the remainder of the walling, with bands of Portland stone at the top. The overall character of the elevations has been described as "Art Deco cum classical", with the deep-set vertical strips of fenestration being particularly notable.

Setting

The building occupies the corner of May Street and Cromac Street. A later entrance bay has been added to the rear elevation, and a large car park to the south fronts onto Hamilton Street.

Historical Background

The first telephone exchanges in Belfast and Dublin were established in 1879, the year after Thomas Edison had filed a patent for his carbon telephone transmitter in the United States. The Irish Times reported at the time that in Belfast "the novelty is being taken up with considerable enthusiasm by the merchants and others for whose benefit it is designed." In 1884, following negotiations between the telephone companies of England and Ireland and the government, the restriction on their operation to a four-mile radius was lifted and a rapid extension of the system followed.

In 1892 a trunk line was opened between Dublin and Belfast. The two private companies involved — the Telephone Company of Ireland (Dublin) and the National Telephone Company of Belfast — co-operated to set a rate of sixpence for calls between each city and Dundalk, and one shilling for towns beyond Dundalk. At that time Belfast had a flourishing exchange with around six hundred subscribers, but there was as yet no telephonic communication with Britain. In 1895 lines between Dublin, Belfast, London, Glasgow and Edinburgh were inaugurated under the terms of the Telegraph Act 1892, Ireland being connected to the British system by means of a submarine wire between Portpatrick and Donaghadee. By this point trunk lines were under government ownership, with private telephone companies operating only within cities or towns.

Following public dissatisfaction with the operations of the National Telephone Company, it was taken over by the Postmaster General in 1912, and a further period of rapid expansion followed. By 1925, Britain had decided to spend £35 million on further development of the telephone system. Many Members of Parliament felt that Great Britain was very backward in the development of the telephone: at that time there were 2.9 phones per 100 of population in the United Kingdom, compared with 15 per 100 in the United States. Belfast had a particularly outdated system, using the magnetic telephone by which the subscriber had to turn a handle to connect with the exchange. Demand in Belfast to be connected to the network could barely be met, and it was not uncommon for an intending subscriber to wait years for a connection. There was considerable debate, however, about whether an automatic system was necessary. Epsom had opened the first automatic exchange in 1912, and by 1925 there were eighteen such exchanges in Britain, but there were those in authority who felt that a good operator service, as Belfast undoubtedly had, was not inferior to an automatic one.

The decision to open an automatic exchange in Belfast, replacing the former exchange on Queen Street, was taken in the mid-1920s, shortly before the first automatic exchange opened at Ship Street, Dublin. The undertaking was considerable, involving the installation of plant including underground cables before a superstructure could be built, and the estimated cost was £500,000. It was felt that construction should not begin until the completion of the new Parliament at Stormont, and work on the exchange building began in November 1932 — shortly after Stormont was completed — by the same contractors, Stewart and Partners. The contract with Stewart and Partners was valued at £48,474, and the steelwork for the structure was fabricated by Harland and Wolff.

The attribution of the design has been a matter of some complexity. The Irish Builder reported in 1929 that the architect was Roland Ingleby Smith O.B.E., F.R.I.B.A., Chief Architect of the Ministry of Finance, and several contemporary sources concur. However, the extent of Smith's personal involvement is unclear, given that he regularly oversaw the work of others and signed drawings produced within the Ministry. Other contemporary sources credit Thomas Francis O. Rippingham as the designer, and it is Rippingham who is now regarded as the architect. Rippingham became Chief Architect of the Works Division in the mid-1940s and was responsible, among other works, for the standard design for Royal Ulster Constabulary barracks throughout Ulster, the first of which was constructed at around the same time that work began on Telephone House.

According to architectural historian Paul Larmour, the building was originally laid out as an L-shape and was later extended in the same style in 1959 to form a square block, with a pitched roof of handmade Spanish tiles over a new seventh storey added around the whole block. A series of plain neo-Georgian satellite exchanges was also built at various points in the city, also under the direction of Roland Ingleby Smith; examples survive at Paulett Avenue and Windsor Park.

The building was officially opened on 25th November 1935 in the presence of the Postmaster General and the then Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Viscount Craigavon. Craigavon described the building as a permanent memorial to the Post Office as the developer of the telephone network, praising "the remarkably high standard of industrial art…in the beauty of line of the modern telephone and in the imposing exterior of Telephone House, both of which illustrate how effectively functional perfection can be combined with artistic design."

The building enters valuation records in 1935 as a "Telephone Exchange etc", the property of His Majesty's Postmaster General, valued at £750, and is first shown on the seventh edition Ordnance Survey map of 1938. A modern extension was added around 1976–7, and the building was damaged by a bomb blast in 1989. Although the interior has been substantially altered, the building's scale and Art Deco character remain unique in Northern Ireland.