Pizza Express, 25 Bedford Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT2 7EJ

Pizza Express, 25 Bedford Street, Belfast

A symmetrical five-bay, three-storey-with-attic terraced building in Lombardic style, built in 1871 to designs by architect John Boyd. Originally constructed as a linen warehouse, it incorporates what were formerly numbered 21 and 23 (HB26/30/015 A&B). The building is located on the west side of Bedford Street in Belfast city centre, on an important thoroughfare north of the junction with Ormeau Avenue and south of City Hall. It survives as one of a number of nineteenth-century linen warehouses that characterise the social and economic development of Belfast during the Victorian era.

The building is rectangular on plan with a distinctive bowed front façade. Externally, it is constructed in Flemish-bonded red-brick with yellow brick dressings. A dog-tooth string course runs at the impost level to the second-floor windows. The pitched roof is covered in natural slate with yellow brick chimneystacks. Cast-iron ogee rainwater goods sit on projecting masonry eaves, which feature an arcaded Lombardic frieze eaves course.

The principal elevation faces east and is symmetrically arranged. Windows are segmental and round-headed replacements, timber-framed with 2/2 sliding sashes set in yellow brick chamfered surrounds. The surrounds feature ornamented painted masonry keystones and corner stones, with projecting painted masonry sills. The composition of the façade is anchored by a gabled entrance bay flanked by two windows on either side. A distinctive double-height recess rises from the first-floor sill course, embracing a loggia-style window with an oculus above. The attic contains a tripartite window; the oculus has a carved head to its keystone, while the loggia-style window has a corbelled and dentilled plinth. The entrance is a double-leaf raised-and-fielded six-panel door with a segmental-headed transom light, set in a decorative painted masonry lugged surround with moulded architrave.

The south elevation is abutted by an adjoining building. The west (rear) elevation is five windows wide to the second floor; the first floor has four windows with a lean-to roof abutment to the far left, and the ground floor is concealed. The north elevation is abutted by adjoining building HB26/30/015B. The building has a single-storey modern extension to the rear and is accessed via a tarmacadamed alley at the rear.

Externally, proportions and detailing have largely retained much of the building's original character, with sympathetic restoration undertaken over the years. Although the warehouse has been subdivided into three separate properties, the building retains its architectural integrity. The structure contributes significantly to the character of the group as a whole and to the streetscape of this conservation area.

Historically, the warehouses were built for William Ferguson, a linen merchant, on Bedford Street, which had been laid out in the 1850s in an area formerly known as McLean's fields. The site had been slow to develop due to the damp floodplain of the River Blackstaff, but following drainage of the area, spinning and weaving factories had begun to colonise the western side of the street by the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858. The new warehouses first appear on the 1871–3 street map of Belfast.

The first recorded occupier of number 25 was Gabriel A Bulloch, a shirt and shirting manufacturer who leased the warehouse from William Ferguson at a valuation of £127. By the 1880s the warehouse was being let room by room, with Bulloch joined by Samuel McBride, a linen merchant. By 1888, ownership had passed to John Ferguson & Co, described at the time 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." The company occupied the ground floor whilst other floors were let to Nicholson & Douglas, handkerchief manufacturers, and Wilson, Malcolmson & Co.

Over the subsequent decades, the building was occupied by a succession of linen and textile manufacturing firms, including Nicholson and Sons, Galloway & Co, John Patterson & Co, William Walker & Co Ltd, Abernethy & Magnus Ltd, Bamford Bleach Works Ltd, Thomas Sinton & Co Ltd, Joseph H Capper & Co Ltd, Ballymena Manufacturing Co Ltd, and John Wilson & Son. This pattern reflected Belfast's prominence in the linen trade throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the 1950s, non-linen manufacturing firms began to appear, with Glenwell Holdings Ltd taking offices in 1958. By 1962, the building had been acquired by the Belfast and Ulster Licensed Vintners' Association and JRW Murland, a consulting engineer, marking the end of nearly a century of association with linen manufacture. The building currently functions as a restaurant.