Site of former no. 27 Bowling Green, Strabane, County Tyrone

This is the site on the northeastern side of the Bowling Green, Strabane, formerly occupied by a three-storey end-of-terrace house. The building was demolished around 1988 to make way for the present police station complex.

The date of construction is uncertain. The site appears as a developed plot on the Ordnance Survey map of 1833–34, with a block whose plan resembles that of the building as it stood until its demolition. However, the town plan drawn up to accompany the valuation of 1832–34 has been lost, making it very difficult to establish precise details about the buildings in Strabane at that date. An annotation written into a later valuation book in 1896 states that the house was "fifty years old" by that time, implying construction around 1846 — but such estimates were frequently imprecise, and the building's plain late Georgian appearance, as recorded in First Survey photographs taken in February 1970, strongly suggests a pre-1840s date. The property is therefore believed to have been built sometime prior to 1833, though a date in the 1830s or early 1840s cannot be ruled out.

The First Survey report of 10 February 1970 recorded the short terrace of similar dwellings to which this property belonged in the following terms: a terrace of four three-storey houses with rendered walls; slated roofs behind parapets with moulded cornices, with half the terrace roof hipped; drop-hung windows with full glazing bars on the first floor, all but one on the ground floor, and only one on the second floor, the remainder being plain with single vertical glazing bars; the windows of two of the houses enclosed in eared architraves; plain wooden pilasters flanking three of the entrances, with an entablature over one of them; the other door recessed in a square-headed opening and surmounted by a rectangular fanlight with semicircular glazing bars and radials; the whole terrace nine windows wide.

The second valuation of 1857 records that this house was at that point part of a larger dwelling which also encompassed the former no. 29 to the northwest. This raises the possibility that the combined property was the large dwelling recorded in the 1832 valuation as measuring 49ft by 52ft by 32ft, occupied by a William Orr and rated at £38-11-11, though this cannot be confirmed with certainty.

By 1857, the larger property of which no. 27 formed part was in use as a branch of the Provincial Bank, managed by a James Crosbie, with the representatives of General Henry Barnard as the immediate lessor. According to Michael Harron's research into economic developments in Strabane between 1800 and 1900, the Provincial Bank had established a branch on the Bowling Green in 1839, and it is confirmed as operating there by at least 1846, when it appears in Slater's Directory of that year. Whether it occupied this particular building before 1857 cannot be established with certainty, as other banks in the Bowling Green are known to have changed premises during the 19th century. The branch continued to operate from the property until sometime in the 1880s, with John C. Urqhart and John G. Elliott serving as managers after Crosbie, though the valuers are not precise about the exact date of closure.

By 1896 the building was reported as vacant and in a state of disrepair. The following year a James White took on the tenancy, and by 1899 he was subletting the ground floor as offices to a solicitor named Robert Burke. In 1910 James White — noted in the 1905 Belfast and Province of Ulster Directory as a hardware merchant with premises in Main Street — acquired the freehold and is recorded as the sole occupier. The 1905 Ordnance Survey town plan of Strabane marks the building as "Bank House." James White appears to have died in the early 1930s, after which the building was divided into two properties. One member of the White family remained in the newly formed no. 27 until 1952, when the house was purchased by a Dr Brian Deeny, who was still in residence in 1972. The property, together with the adjoining no. 29, was demolished around 1988 to make way for the present police station.