Bryson House, 28 Bedford Street, Belfast, County Antrim, BT2 7FE

Bryson House, 28 Bedford Street, Belfast

Bryson House is a former linen warehouse, now used as offices, built between 1865 and 1867 to designs by the architect W.J. Barre. The building is three storeys with an attic, rectangular on plan, and occupies a prominent corner site on the east side of Bedford Street, immediately adjacent to the Ulster Hall. It is a landmark building in central Belfast, and one of the finest surviving examples of Venetian Gothic commercial architecture in the city.

EXTERIOR

The building presents its main elevation to the west, facing Bedford Street, with an extensive secondary elevation running along the south side of Franklin Street to the north. The roof is hipped and covered in natural slate, with lead ridges. The eaves are formed in overhanging sandstone supported on sandstone modillions above an angled brick course, with ogee-moulded cast-iron guttering and cast-iron downpipes. The chimneys are elaborate: they rise from both side elevations on corbelled-out machicolations decorated with trefoil sandstone panels, with offsets and tapered capstones to stop-chamfered grouped redbrick stacks. The walls are redbrick laid in Flemish bond, with continuous sandstone impost and sill courses and a moulded sandstone plinth course.

Window openings are square-headed to the first and second floors, with decorative carved sandstone panels and voussoired sandstone arches; those at ground floor level are round-headed, also with voussoired sandstone arches. All windows throughout are single-pane timber sash.

The symmetrical front elevation to Bedford Street is the building's most elaborately detailed face. At second-floor level, the windows are arranged in three groups of three, each group set on a continuous moulded sill course with a pair of squat columns bearing stiff-leaf capitals. Above each group are three carved panels with quatrefoil decoration to three voussoired arches, with a continuous hood moulding running across. At first-floor level, six larger window openings sit on a continuous deep sill course. Each has a continuous stiff-leaf impost moulding, a recessed panel with quatrefoil decoration, a voussoired pointed sandstone arch, and a hood moulding. The central pair of these windows open onto a balcony that rises directly from the central doorcase below. At ground-floor level, four round-headed windows sit on a continuous splayed sandstone sill course with continuous stiff-leaf impost moulding and voussoired sandstone arches with hood mouldings.

The central doorcase is exceptional. It has curved jambs flanked by pairs of squat columns with stiff-leaf capitals supporting a compound voussoired round arch, above which is a decoratively carved stone overdoor panel with carved spandrel panels to either side. The doors themselves are a pair of polished timber, each with eight diamond-faced panels. To either side of the arch, an oversized console bracket supports a truncated column with a stiff-leaf capital, which in turn carries a lintel cornice, a trefoil-panelled frieze, a stiff-leaf cornice, and a balustrade with moulded coping and stop-chamfered piers.

The Franklin Street elevation to the north is nine windows wide. Second-floor windows are arranged in pairs and detailed as on the front elevation; first- and ground-floor windows follow the same treatment as the front. Towards the eastern end of this elevation is a secondary entrance doorcase detailed to match the main entrance, though with replacement doors; above this is a paired window opening with a central column and a carved panel inscribed with the date 1867. A further round-headed entrance, detailed to match the ground-floor windows, is positioned at the centre of this elevation, fitted with double-leaf painted timber doors detailed as on the main entrance.

The rear east elevation is largely obscured by the adjoining building at No. 21 Linenhall Street. The south elevation is partly abutted by the Ulster Hall and faces onto a small forecourt; it is only four windows wide, with a central chimney detailed as described above. Windows on this elevation follow the same detailing as the north side. Simple square-headed window openings are located at the re-entrant angle, and a redbrick lift shaft rises above roof level at this point.

INTERIOR

The building was converted to office use in recent years, and the internal layout has been largely altered in the process. However, some elements of a typical Victorian interior survive.

HISTORY

The warehouse was built for William Girdwood of Wm Girdwood & Co, linen and calico printers, who purchased a lease from the Ulster Hall Company in October 1864 with the declared intention of building one of "those commercial palaces which formed the greatest ornament of the town." The plot had only become available for development after the damp floodplain of the River Blackstaff was drained and Bedford Street was laid out in the 1850s; the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858 shows Bedford Street already developed to the west but still largely unbuilt on the eastern side. A condition of Girdwood's lease required him to spend at least £800 on construction within a specified period. W.J. Barre — the same architect responsible for the neighbouring Ulster Hall — drew up the plans, and a contractor named Mr Ross was engaged. Construction was delayed for some time by a dispute between Girdwood and the Town Surveyor over whether the building's frontage should be set back four feet or five feet from the street in order to provide a wider pavement for visitors to the Ulster Hall. By November 1866 work on what newspapers called "Mr Girdwood's embryo warehouse" was underway. The building enters valuation records in 1868 as vacant offices and warehouse valued at £380, and it appears for the first time on the 1871 street map of Belfast.

William Girdwood (1827–1879) lived at a mansion in Oldpark, where his linen printing works were also located. He was a keen yachtsman, but died suddenly aged 52 while on a yachting cruise to Douglas on the Isle of Man in 1879. He does not appear to have ever used the warehouse for his own business; valuation records and street directories record it as vacant until 1877, when it was taken by Malcolm & Pentland, manufacturers of linen cambric and bleachers. Although that firm later vacated, James Malcolm remained the leaseholder until 1919, when Edward Shaw & Co acquired ownership. Subsequent occupants included William Liddell & Co, linen manufacturers and bleachers; Edward Shaw & Co, linen and linen yarn merchants, who occupied the ground floor from at least 1895; J.W. Charley & Co, linen merchants, manufacturers and bleachers (1895) on the first floor; Geo Gray & Sons Ltd, with works at Glenanne, County Armagh (1904–1928); and John McCaughey, dealing in linens, glass cloths, towels and related goods (1931–1937).

In 1944 the building was put up for auction and purchased by Edwin Bryson, former chairman of linen and carpet manufacturers Spence Bryson, to serve as a centre for the Belfast Council of Social Welfare. That organisation had been formed in 1906, descended from the Belfast Charity Organisation Society, which had itself been founded on the initiative of the Belfast Christian Civic Union. The building was named after Bryson's mother, Mrs Mary Bryson. The model for the project was Gaddum House in Manchester, one of the first Social Service Centres to open in the United Kingdom, itself a conversion of two former cotton warehouses. Bryson visited Gaddum House and was struck by the potential that a warehouse building offered for such a purpose.

Messrs Stevenson & Son supervised the conversion. In 1945 the Council also purchased 20 Franklin Street for £8,650, having concluded that the Bedford Street building alone would not be large enough to serve a city the size of Belfast. Funding of £10,000 was received from the Carnegie Trustees, later increased to £15,000 when reconstruction costs rose. C & W McQuoid were the contractors for the reconstruction work, which included the creation of a boardroom and a large committee room capable of seating 150 people. Bryson House opened on 12 March 1948 in the presence of a large gathering that included Sir Basil Brooke, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, and Lord Norman, Chairman of the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust. A representative of the Roman Catholic Church was also present — notably so at a time when contacts between the two communities were very limited, reflecting the non-sectarian ethos of the organisation.

The building was at the time considered highly innovative: it was described as "one of the most imaginative enterprises ever undertaken in the cause of social science — the establishment of one centre from which nearly all the principal welfare organisations in the Province can operate," with the observation that while London, Manchester and Glasgow had experimented with group centres housing a few societies in one building, nothing comparable to Bryson House existed elsewhere. Today around 200 social services centres exist across the United Kingdom.

In the early 1980s a new roof with skylights was added and the ground floor was remodelled, with floors carpeted and ceilings lowered. The organisation has undergone several changes of name over the years and in 2006 became the Bryson Charitable Group.

SETTING

The building occupies a corner site with its front elevation lining the east side of Bedford Street immediately to the left of the Ulster Hall, and its extensive side elevation lining the south side of Franklin Street.