17 Bedford Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT2 7EH

17 Bedford Street is a former linen warehouse in Belfast city centre, built around 1870 to designs by Glasgow-based architect James Hamilton. It stands on the west side of Bedford Street, on a prominent corner site at the junction with Franklin Street, directly opposite the Ulster Hall. Now vacant, it is one of the finest surviving 19th-century warehouses in the city and a landmark building of significant historical and architectural interest, both locally and in the wider context of Northern Ireland's economic development.

The building is designed in a Venetian-Renaissance style and is detached, three storeys tall with an attic storey, and arranged on an L-shaped plan. The principal facades are clad in ashlar sandstone, while the gables and rear elevation are constructed in Flemish-bonded red brick. A moulded string course runs between the first and second floors. The roof is a double-pile natural slate construction with brick chimneystacks to the gables. Cast-iron ogee rainwater goods serve the rear elevation.

The most distinctive external feature is the curved corner entrance bay at the northeast, which rises into an attic-level copper dome topped by a drum and weathervane. This curved portico bay has a central recessed doorway — currently boarded — accessed by three stone steps and framed by twin Corinthian columns and pilasters on a raised moulded base, surmounted by a moulded architrave. The inner doorway is framed by pilasters with an ornately carved frieze, surmounted by a semi-circular transom with a carved head keystone. The first and second floors of this bay each have three windows. At attic level, seven slender casement windows are divided by semi-engaged Corinthian columns, and the copper dome above has three apertures in decorative classical-style surrounds.

Throughout the principal elevations, windows are round-headed, top-hung, metal-framed casements framed by pilaster jambs with moulded archivolts, keystones, and surrounds, and are recessed at ground and first floor level. The ground floor windows have stilted segmental-headed arches, moulded decorative archivolts, and a moulded sill course set on a high moulded base. Attic windows feature tracery-style casements with ornately carved surrounds and moulded archivolts. The second floor windows across the principal facades are framed by alternate single and twin Corinthian columns supporting a frieze and architrave, above which runs a dentilled cornice and a pierced blocking course to the parapet.

The south wing is almost symmetrically arranged, with four pairs of windows to either side of a central bay one Venetian window wide. The central bay has an attic window and a recessed porch with decorative wrought-iron gates, similar in treatment to the main northeast entrance. The far left of this wing has an additional entrance door — currently boarded — framed by paired Corinthian columns, with single windows to the first floor and an attic window above. The west wing is ten windows wide, with attic windows at the far left and right.

To the rear, the south and west wings have irregularly arranged windows on each floor. A variety of segmental-headed timber and metal-framed top-hung casements appear at the rear. The windows to the far right side of the south wing have been bricked up. The south gable is partly obscured at ground floor level by a modern extension of no architectural interest; the first floor has five metal-framed casement windows and the second floor has three 4/4 metal-framed windows. The west gable is covered in corrugated steel sheeting.

The building is set within a tarmacadamed car park to the rear, with a seven-storey modern office block immediately to the south.

The warehouse was built in 1869 for the Bedford Street Weaving Company, whose factory occupied the block bounded by Franklin Street to the north, Clarence Street to the south, and McClintock Street to the west. The site had formerly been part of McLean's fields — a damp floodplain of the River Blackstaff that had remained undeveloped until drainage works made it viable. Bedford Street itself was a new road laid out in the 1850s, and by the time of the second-edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858, spinning and weaving factories had already colonised the western side of the street. The new warehouse first appears on the 1871–3 Belfast street map.

The building confidently expressed Belfast's world dominance in the linen trade at the time of its construction. Its architect, James Hamilton, was also responsible for the former Ulster Bank in Waring Street, Belfast, and further Ulster Bank branches in Trim and Sligo. Though based in Glasgow, Hamilton is thought to have maintained a Belfast office for a period during the 1860s.

The warehouse first entered valuation records in 1871, at which point it was assessed as two separate units — each comprising an office and wareroom — with the more northerly half valued at £330 and the remainder at £230. The Bedford Street Weaving Company overextended itself during the linen boom caused by the American Civil War, and in 1876 the buildings were purchased by William Ewart and Son, flax spinners, linen manufacturers, weavers, and merchants. By 1900, the associated factory employed 350 workers and housed 486 looms; the warehouse served as a buffer — both physical and architectural — between the factory behind it and Bedford Street, providing space where goods were stored and displayed to potential customers. The Belfast Revaluation of 1900 records it simply as a warehouse.

The Ewart firm occupied the premises from 1876 until the early 1990s. As the linen industry declined, the company diversified, and from 1923 most of the Bedford Street site was let out to other linen businesses, with Ewart's retaining only the current building. By 1974 the firm had turned its attention to property and was reconstituted as Ewarts Properties Ltd. It became a publicly listed company by 1987 and, following an acquisition in 2000, became Dunloe Ewart plc. The current owners acquired William Ewart Properties Ltd — including its Northern Ireland and Great Britain portfolio — from Dunloe Ewart in 2002.

As the company began to diversify during the 1970s, the building was shared with other businesses and organisations, including automotive and office equipment companies, the Northern Ireland Housing Executive, and the Belfast Education and Library Board. The building was vacated in the early 1990s and has remained vacant since. Architectural detailing is of good quality and largely intact, with some sympathetic restoration to the stonework carried out in recent years. The building lies within a conservation area and is of industrial archaeological interest.