7 Sion Terrace, Sion Mills, Co Tyrone, BT82 9HB

7 Sion Terrace is an impressive and well-proportioned end-of-terrace two-bay two-storey house built around 1898, located on the east side of Church Square in Sion Mills. It forms the extreme left of a terrace of seven worker's dwellings, built by Herdman & Co as part of their model village scheme.

The house is rectangular on plan with a one-and-a-half-storey gabled return and single-storey lean-to extension to the rear, plus a single-storey canted bay to the east. The pitched roof is covered in natural slate with blue and black clay ridge tiles sitting over a corbelled eaves course. Yellow brick corbelled chimneys rise from the party walls and return. The roof contains one original rooflight to the east pitch and two to the west pitch.

The walls are painted roughcast over a painted plinth, whilst the return and canted bay are smooth rendered. Windows are square-headed timber-framed 1/1 sliding sashes in smooth reveals with painted masonry sills. The principal elevation faces east and features a square-headed opening containing a replacement four-panelled timber entrance door with glazed top panels and transom light. The ground floor left is occupied by the canted bay, with two windows at first floor. An original rectangular cast-iron plaque inscribed "THE TERRACE" is positioned at the left of this elevation. The south gable is blank and is abutted at ground floor by shared garages. The west elevation is abutted at the left by the gabled return, with an exposed section to the right containing a single 6/6 sliding sash window at first floor and a lean-to at ground floor. The south elevation of the gable contains a single window at each floor, while the west and north elevations are blank. The north gable is abutted by the adjacent property. The house is directly accessed from the street at the east.

A roughcast boundary wall with concrete coping encloses a yard to the rear, accessed through a square-headed vertically-sheeted timber door. A garden lies across a path to the rear, bounded by hedging. The house retains cast-iron half-round gutters and round downpipes.

Many original features remain intact, including the yellow brick chimneys and the interior layouts of these simply detailed dwellings. The terrace is an important architectural group within Sion Mills and enjoys a good setting overlooking Church Square.

Sion Mills was a company-owned town established by Herdman & Co, a flax spinning mill, run as a model village for the mill workers and village maintenance staff who had access to healthcare. According to historical records, the village was originally built with simple but well-constructed one-storey terraced cottages. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Captain Ricardo was the Director in charge of personnel and welfare, second storeys were added to many houses as the linen trade expanded and workers needed accommodation for lodgers during the week. The Herdmans' social experiment in Sion Mills followed similar principles to Robert Owen's model village at New Lanark. Until the 1960s, the mill maintained a workforce trained in all necessary trades to repair village houses and the mill itself, whilst workers paid for rent and gas fortnightly. The Herdmans provided a shop and dispensary, with workers contributing a small amount weekly towards healthcare. A Doctor's house and surgery were built in Mill Lane at the end of the nineteenth century, and the village maintained its own fire service. The terrace first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey Map in 1905. Annual Revisions documents indicate that Nos. 6 and 7 date from 1898, with valuation records showing these properties were leased from J&E Herdman. In the early 1960s, as the linen industry contracted, the company sold off village houses to raise capital, with two-storey houses priced at around £120.