13 Alexandra Place, Sion Mills, Co Tyrone, BT82 9HR, *** See General Comments***

13 Alexandra Place is a mid-terrace one-and-a-half-storey house built around 1880 as worker's housing for the local Herdman's Mill, situated on the west side of Melmount Road in Sion Mills. It forms the fourth house from the left in a terrace of eleven.

The building is rectangular in plan with a two-storey flat-roofed extension added to the west around 1995. The pitched roof is covered in natural slate with terracotta ridge tiles and features deep overhanging eaves with decorative timber bargeboards. A roughcast chimney with concrete coping and replacement clay pots rises from the roof. The walls are painted roughcast finish over a smooth banded plinth.

Windows are replacement square-headed uPVC casements set in smooth rendered reveals with painted masonry sills. The principal elevation faces east and contains at the left a square-headed opening with a replacement vertically-sheeted timber door, a single window at the right, and a central gabled dormer serving the attic. The south gable is abutted by the adjoining property HB10/07/009L, while the north gable is abutted by HB10/07/009N. The west elevation, formed by the extension, contains a single uPVC casement window at each floor and a square-headed uPVC door at ground floor right. The house is directly accessed from the street at the east. A roughcast boundary wall with concrete coping encloses a rear yard, with access through a vertically-sheeted timber gate. Cast-iron half-round gutters and round downpipes provide rainwater goods.

The ground floor return has been remodelled and extended to include first floor accommodation around 1995. The building first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1905 as part of the terrace. Valuation Revisions from 1879 note that 'Houses [are] in Progress…1879', with properties numbered 3–20 valued at £2 10s and listed as 'house, office and yard' with various occupiers.

Sion Mills was a company-owned town established by Herdman & Co., a flax spinning mill operated by the Herdman family as a model village for their workers and maintenance staff. The workers enjoyed access to healthcare as standard provision until the village was privatised in the mid 1960s when the mills needed to raise capital during a slump in the linen industry. Dwellings, both single and two-storey, were built by the Herdman family to house the new generation of flax mill workers, who by 1853 numbered upwards of 500. The cottages are part of a planned layout comparable to the work of Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire. The village originally consisted of simple but well-built one-storey terraced cottages to house workers and save them from having to walk miles to work. Until the 1960s, the mill trained and employed people in all necessary trades for maintaining and repairing village houses and surroundings, as well as the mill, its machinery, and the water-power system. Householders were charged fortnightly rent and gas, with occasional increases. The Herdmans operated a village shop with fair prices and a dispensary, with workers paying a small deduction from wages—one penny per week in the early days, rising to sixpence in the 1940s—towards healthcare, while the mill employed a doctor and mill nurse. A doctor's house and surgery were built on Mill Lane at the end of the nineteenth century, and the village maintained its own fire service and fire engine.

The house and adjoining terrace have undergone considerable alterations and extensions that have diminished their original architectural character both individually and as a group. Despite these changes, their general massing and historic interest as worker housing contribute to the Sion Mills Conservation Area.