G E McKee, 17 Bridge Street, Coleraine, Co. Londonderry, BT52 1DR

G E McKee, 17 Bridge Street, Coleraine

A single-bay two-storey mid-terraced Georgian shop built around 1820, located on the north side of Bridge Street in Coleraine town centre. The building is a rare survivor of Georgian Coleraine architecture and a good example of the domestic scale and type that characterised the town in the early nineteenth century. It is notable for its bowed front—an increasingly rare feature in Northern Ireland—and forms part of a group with numbers 11–15 and 21.

The building has a rectangular plan with a single-storey roughcast rendered return to the rear, built around 1950. The roof is pitched natural slate with blue-black angled ridge tiles and curved cast-iron half-round rainwater goods on metal brackets. The walling is painted smooth render.

The principal elevation faces south and features the distinctive bowed form with two windows at first floor set above the shopfront. Windows are 3/1 timber sash with horns and projecting sills. The shopfront comprises plate glass windows with timber frame mounted on a ceramic tiled stall riser. A recessed splayed porch is positioned to the left, with tiling to the left side and an inset timber-framed glazed display unit; the right side is fully glazed. The floor has modern tiles and a painted timber ceiling. The original three-panelled timber door with glazed top section and brass pull handle is surmounted by a plain transom light. An elaborate slender fluted cast-iron column, a surviving element of the nineteenth-century shopfront, supports the upper floor. The fascia has metal sheeting printed with "G-E-Kee". Upper storeys of the west and east elevations could not be viewed as they are abutted by adjoining buildings (numbers 21 and 11–15 respectively).

The building is prominently situated on Bridge Street in Coleraine town centre within a Georgian terrace of two- and three-storey commercial units in the most westerly pedestrianised area of the town. Bridge Street leads from the Town Hall to the east and the Bann Bridge to the west.

The building is shown on the first edition Ordnance Survey map as an extension to the neighbouring building at number 21. It does not appear in the Book of Coleraine dating from around 1816. At the Townland Valuation (1828–40), number 17 was included in the valuation of the adjoining Miss Henry's Hotel, valued at £38.16s.2d. By Griffith's Valuation (1856–64), the building was valued separately at £20, though it likely incorporated rooms in the adjacent structure. It was then occupied by John O'Kane and subsequently fell vacant. The 1856–64 valuation describes the building with rear return and multiple outbuildings, including dimensions for a single-storey tap room, suggesting it functioned as a public house at that stage.

In the 1860s the premises was taken over with its neighbour by Charles Doherty, a cabinet maker who ran an auction and commission mart. The house was described as dilapidated at this period, and the valuation was reduced to £10. In 1896 James and William Dunlop, cycle agents, took over the building, operating it as a wareroom and store valued at £22. The Dunlops were among the first to sell motor vehicles in Coleraine; in 1905 James Dunlop procured for a customer a car called the "Minervette" of 6½ hp with 2 forward speeds, a reverse and two brakes.

Hugh McKeag, an able seaman, and his wife Annie McKeag, a draper, occupied the premises from 1898 (1901 census). James Caskey, a seed and manure merchant, followed in 1907, and T B Morrison, working in cement, fireclay and monumental works, occupied it by 1911. In 1913 the buildings were divided into two holdings: a shop, store, workshop and yard valued at £13 and occupied by T B Morrison, and a shop and stores occupied by William McCandless, a jeweller, valued at £16 but having no proper shop window—merely a room of a dwelling house used as a shop. By the 1930s the building was occupied by the Sun Decorating Company, followed by G E Kerr and R A Shorrock, operating as a shop with a small stock room to the rear at an annual rent of £30. The building continues in commercial use.