103-107 Royal Avenue &, 77-79 North Street, Belfast, Co Antrim, BT1 1FF

Corner-sited stucco commercial building, 103–107 Royal Avenue and 77–79 North Street, Belfast

This is a corner-sited, terraced, multi-bay, three-storey building with attic, built in 1883–84 to designs by Thomas Jackson and Son for Forster Green and Co, tea merchants. The contractor was T D Dixon and Co of Clifton Street. Irregular in plan, the building faces west onto Royal Avenue with a curved elevation turning the corner onto North Street. It was extensively refurbished around 1989 by Mairs and Wray and was undergoing further internal refurbishment at the time of listing in 2012.

Exterior

The roof is finished in natural slate with lead lining to the steep front pitch and curves around the corner. Several tall profiled rendered chimneystacks and gable walls rise above the roofline with sandstone coping. The roof sits behind a balustraded parapet wall punctuated by a series of pedimented dormer windows. Cast-iron rainwater goods, including downpipes, are positioned between paired pilasters.

The walls are painted rendered stucco throughout. Fluted pilasters frame each window on every floor. The central curved section of the elevation is framed by paired pilasters surmounted by console brackets and segmental pediments, corresponding to the raised gables above. A full-span frieze and corbelled crown cornice run above the second floor, embellished with egg-and-dart moulding. A full-span dentilled cornice above a frieze runs over the ground floor.

Window openings are square-headed throughout, largely tripartite with single-pane timber sash windows. First-floor windows have alternating segmental and triangular pediments to the central lights, supported on engaged Corinthian columns.

The curved front elevation onto Royal Avenue is eleven windows wide. To the north end there is a square-headed door opening, a glazed shopfront, and a further pedimented door opening with a replacement timber door. The remainder of the ground floor consists of a series of fixed-pane glazed shopfronts flanked by replacement engaged Ionic columns and a frieze. The original ground-floor detailing has been lost; the Belfast Newsletter recorded that the original ground-floor columns and pilasters were of polished County Down granite supplied by Messrs Robinson and Co, and that the ground-floor windows were recessed slightly behind the columns to accommodate a stand for displaying goods outside — an arrangement Forster Green were accustomed to using at their High Street premises.

The north side elevation is abutted by the adjoining building at No. 112. The two rear elevations are set at right angles to each other, with cement-rendered walling, square-headed window openings and timber sash windows; they are largely abutted by later extensions. The east side elevation is abutted by an adjoining building, above which a redbrick gable rises.

Interior and Construction

The building was originally divided at ground-floor level into two shops: 103–105 Royal Avenue, occupied by Forster Green and Co, and 107 Royal Avenue, initially let to D Abernethy, haberdasher and draper. A public staircase divided the two premises on the ground floor. The upper floors were let as offices, known as Eagle Chambers. The first floor was constructed of iron joists and concrete, with the deliberate intention that it should be fireproof. The attic floor was occupied by a caretaker; the 1901 census records this as Robert Haslett from County Monaghan, also a Master Carpenter, who lived rent-free in four rooms with his wife and three children, his fifteen-year-old son serving as his apprentice.

History and Context

The Belfast Newsletter reported in November 1883 that the "striking pile of buildings" was nearing completion and would add another to "the fine structures of which Royal Avenue is intended to be composed." The building is first shown on the fourth edition Ordnance Survey map of 1901–02.

Forster Green and Co was founded by the Quaker tea merchant Forster Green, who began business in a small shop on the corner of High Street and Corn Market. That corner was rebuilt as a large tea emporium in 1865, also designed by Thomas Jackson, before being gutted by fire in 1890 and subsequently reconstructed. Forster Green also traded from premises in North Street known as the Golden Eagle, and when the new Royal Avenue building was constructed it was connected to this earlier shop by an archway. By the mid-1890s, however, two additional bays — now 77–79 North Street — had been added to the new premises, replacing the Golden Eagle entirely. A statue of an eagle that had spread its wings over the former shop was relocated to the new building; photographs taken around 1900 by Robert French in the Lawrence Collection show the statue with flanking birds, all of which are now lost.

During the sinking of foundations, a portion of the 17th-century ramparts of Belfast was discovered, comprising an outer brick wall three feet in width and an inner wall eighteen inches wide, the gap between filled with puddle clay. Outside the wall, a considerable number of human skeletons had been found at various locations along Royal Avenue.

In the 1900 Belfast Revaluation, the ground-floor shop facing Royal Avenue was valued at £215, the North Street-facing premises at £325, and No. 107 at £128. The upper offices were valued together at £149.

Forster Green remained in occupation of 103–105 Royal Avenue and 77–79 North Street for some years. By 1915 No. 103–105 had passed to Sinclair and Co, drapers. By the end of the Second World War, another tea and coffee merchant, Herron and Craig, had taken over the North Street side, ending Forster Green's long association with the building. Numbers 103–105 subsequently retained an association with tailoring: Burton Montague tailors took over the Royal Avenue premises and ultimately those in North Street, until 1990 when both passed to House of Hammon, sellers of glass, china and household goods, and then to Hoggs, "the Gift House of Ulster." No. 107 was for many years — from at least 1900 — the shop of R J Dick, leather and gutta-percha boot and shoe manufacturers, passing to Easifit, another footwear company, by 1940, and then to Charles, a fashion specialist, by 1945. In the 1980s No. 107 became an employment agency, Rand Services; at the time of listing the ground floor was occupied by a coffee shop.

Setting

The building is located on the junction of Royal Avenue and North Street, its curved elevation addressing the former commercial heart of Belfast. It sits within a conservation area.