4 Murray Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT1 5HD

Four Murray Street is an asymmetrical terraced six-storey commercial building in brick and stone, completed in 1910 to the designs of architect James A Hanna. It forms part of a major complex of four similar warehouses (including numbers 6 Murray Street and 13-17 Grosvenor Road) that reflected the growth of the textile industry in early twentieth-century Belfast.

The building is rectangular in plan and faces north, positioned in a cul-de-sac on the west side of College Square East, overlooking the grounds of the Royal Academical Institution. Machine-made red brick walling is laid in English garden wall bond. The roof sits behind a red brick parapet wall with sandstone coping and is not visible from street level.

The front elevation is asymmetrical and four windows wide, worked in a loosely Jacobethan idiom with decorative stone detailing repeated across the adjoining buildings. A three-tier canted oriel window projects to the left above the principal entrance. The ground floor is sandstone ashlar, surmounted by a deep moulded cornice with a raised plinth course and three tripartite window openings. Square-headed window openings above have sandstone frames and moulded sandstone sills, though original windows have been lost and replaced with uPVC.

The top floor, raised in the left bay, features decorative corbels at the corners and an oval window formed in voussoired sandstone with keystones and decorative scrolls. The central two floors have largely quadripartite windows, with bipartite openings to the right bay. The fourth floor displays a horizontal quadripartite window comprising a series of columns with cushion capitals resting on a single bracketed sill course with frieze and cornice above.

The round-headed door opening below the oriel is voussoired with three keystones flanked by angled mouldings with foliate corbelled bases. The corbelled base bears an acanthus moulding and carries carved digits reading '1910'. Replacement double-leaf hardwood panelled doors with scrolled head and multi-paned overlight are flanked by a pair of hardwood panels.

The east side elevation is abutted by an adjoining infill building. A plainer red brick elevation extends southwards with flush concrete sills and lintel courses. The south rear elevation has glazed brick walling with windows largely blocked up. The west side is abutted by the adjoining number 5 Murray Street.

The building was constructed in 1908-10 for the Belfast Linen Handkerchief Company and entered valuation records in 1911 as an office, warehouse and laundry valued at £500. The company occupied the premises until the 1940s, when it passed to Richardson Sons J N Sons & Owden Ltd, who remained tenants until the 1970s. From the 1920s onwards, governmental functions such as the Stationery Office, Record Office and Ministry of Labour shared the premises. By the mid-1980s the building housed the offices of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive.

A photograph from 1917 indicates considerable alteration since original construction, particularly at roof level. Despite the loss of original windows, which compromises the external appearance, much historic fabric survives. The building is among the most interesting commercial structures of the Edwardian era and the years immediately following, representing the work of an architect of note during Belfast's period of industrial expansion.