Northland Road Gate Lodge, University of Ulster, Magee Campus, Northland Road, Londonderry, BT48 7JL

Northland Road Gate Lodge, University of Ulster Magee Campus

This is a former gate lodge with an associated pair of pedimented arches, built around 1880, forming part of the southwest entrance to the University of Ulster's Magee Campus on Northland Road, Londonderry. The listing covers the gate lodge itself, its attached outbuildings, the arches, and the connecting walling. The building was previously listed as part of the Aberfoyle House group.

Origins and Historical Background

The lodge was constructed around 1880 as one of two gate lodges serving Richmond House, a two-storey gentleman's mansion built in 1845 in the rural townland of Edenballymore for David Watt of Watt & Co., a local distillery established on Abbey Street in 1834 that continued to operate from the Bogside until 1920. The Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1848–49 shows an earlier, square-shaped gate lodge at the Strand Road entrance to the house, valued together with the mansion at £58. David Watt leased the site from a Mr Millar and resided there until his death in 1876.

Following Watt's death, Richmond House was purchased by Bartholomew McCorkell of William McCorkell & Co., a local shipping firm based on the Strand Road that transported emigrants between Ireland and America. McCorkell extended the house with two-storey additions to the rear and commissioned the Northland Road gate lodge. Annual Revisions records note that these extensions were added in 1879 and that the lodge was first recorded in 1880, with the lodge and its associated coach house valued at £20. Although the architectural historian Dean suggested a construction date of around 1870, the lodge does not appear on the 1873 Ordnance Survey map of Londonderry, confirming the later date.

The original cast-iron gate screen at the road-fronted arch is inscribed with McCorkell's initials. Bartholomew McCorkell resided at Richmond House until his death in 1887, after which the property passed within the family. In 1895 it passed to his daughter Elizabeth McCorkell, who had married Robert Corscaden of Boomhall. By the 1911 census, Richmond House was described as a first-class dwelling of 30 rooms, with two stables and a store among its outbuildings — the stables being located at the coach house on the Northland Road. Following Robert Corscaden's death in 1904 the house passed to his widow Elizabeth, who remained there until her death in 1922, when her nephew Lieutenant-Colonel Herbert Collum took possession.

Upon Collum's death in 1929, Richmond House was sold to Sir Basil McFarland, a local magistrate and baronet who already occupied the neighbouring mansion on the Strand Road — a two-storey sandstone square-plan house built between 1856 and 1860 to designs by Londonderry's County Surveyor Stewart Gordon (d. 1860), originally known as Aberfoyle. When McFarland acquired Richmond in 1929, he renamed it Aberfoyle House, renaming the original Aberfoyle as Talbot House. During the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57), the total rateable value of Aberfoyle House and its two gate lodges was set at £175, later reduced to £160 by the end of the Second Revaluation (1956–72).

A 1970 Ulster Architectural Heritage Society guide described the Northland Road gate lodge as providing "neat townscape detail." Sir Basil McFarland continued to live at Aberfoyle House until his death in 1986. The mansion was sold to Derry City Council in 1990 and listed in the same year, then acquired by the University of Ulster in 1998 and converted into classroom and seminar facilities for Magee's Faculty of Social Sciences. By the 1990s the gate lodge had fallen vacant, and when it was included in the Buildings at Risk register in 2005 it was noted that "the lodge is now boarded up, the gates closed and padlocked and the fine pedimented archway is being slowly covered by rampant greenery." The coach house that originally stood to the east of the porter's lodge had been demolished by the late 20th century, and the site has since been used as a university car park. Aberfoyle House and its former gate lodges were included in the Magee Conservation Area in 2006.

Architectural Description

The building is a single-bay, two-storey structure of random coursed schist walling with lime pointing. A projecting schist plinth course runs along the base, finished with chamfered ashlar sandstone trim. Quoins and window dressings are also in ashlar sandstone. The gate lodge carries a hipped natural slate roof with roll-moulded lead ridges, exposed rafter tails, and cast-iron guttering to the overhanging eaves.

The west elevation faces directly onto Northland Road. At first floor level there are paired window openings with segmental heads formed in ashlar sandstone and flush splayed sills, currently boarded up. At ground floor level there is a timber oriel window supported on four timber brackets, covered with a PVC membrane roof. The oriel is currently concealed behind a fake photographic image of a pair of windows printed onto a vinyl-faced board, with further graphics applied to the ground floor boarding.

The south elevation has a bay window to the right, currently boarded up and without its roof, with a single window opening above. To the left is a boarded-up door opening. The east elevation is abutted by a single-storey lean-to addition and has painted rendered walling, with a single-pane timber sash window at first floor level.

The Arches and Screen Walls

Attached to the south of the lodge is a double-height, round-headed ashlar sandstone arch connected to the lodge by a rubble schist screen wall. A second arch is set at a right angle to the first and abuts the east elevation of the gate lodge. Both arches have voussoired construction with a dropped keystone rising from impost cornices to the piers, and are surmounted by full pediments. Early 20th-century iron gates are fitted to the road-fronted arch only. The impost cornice extends across a short screen wall abutting the south elevation of the lodge and incorporates a voussoired square-headed opening fitted with a matching pedestrian iron gate; this gate contains a circular monogram "McC" highlighted in gold-coloured paint. Beyond the pedimented arch, a small section of rubble schist stone walling is all that remains of the former coach house.

The Outbuildings

Extending to the north of the gate lodge is a two-storey range of outbuildings, formerly stables, with artificial slate roofing, roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles, and some steel rooflights. Cast-iron gutters on rise-and-fall brackets run to both sides. The east-facing front elevation of the outbuildings has square-headed window openings, currently boarded up and randomly placed, with red brick toothed surrounds to the north half, and two small modern rooflights to the east-facing roof slope. The north gable is smooth rendered and unpainted, with clipped eaves, a brick header string course at eaves height, and a tripartite fixed window centred just below the apex. The west elevation of the outbuilding — the former stable — is of random coursed schist with partial rendered quoins and a series of small, regularly spaced circular vents.

Architectural Character and Setting

Dean described the ensemble in the following terms: "Entry to the park and carriage yard via two tall pedimented ashlar archways at right angles to each other, one parallel with, and forming a screen to, the public footway. The semi-circular keystoned arches spring from cornice courses, one of which runs through the wing wall to meet the gatehouse, punctuated by a flat-arched wicket gate en-route. The generous two-storey porter's accommodation forms a big cube below a hipped roof. Faintly Italianate in style, the front elevation alongside the footpath has a first pair of semi-circular-headed sash windows with dressed stone surround over a transomed and mullioned timber oriel supported on four brackets. A tall corbelled four-flue chimney stack in red brick rising off a side wall has been removed."

Despite the alterations — particularly the scale and proportions of windows added to the stable block — the relationship between the impressive arched structures and the orderly symmetry and simple detailing of the gate lodge creates an interesting spatial composition. The building sits at the southwesternmost corner of the Magee Campus, fronting Northland Road to the west with a gravel car park to the rear, and forms part of a concentration of 19th-century structures across the campus that contribute significant character to the Magee Conservation Area.