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

14 Alexandra Place is a mid-terrace one-and-a-half-storey house built around 1880 as worker's housing for the Herdman's Mill at Sion Mills. It stands on the west side of Melmount Road as the fifth dwelling from the left in a terrace of eleven houses.

The building is rectangular in plan with a two-storey flat-roofed extension to the west, added around 1995. The roof is pitched natural slate with terracotta ridge tiles over deep overhanging eaves, featuring decorative timber bargeboards. A roughcast chimney with concrete coping and replacement clay pots rises from the roofline. The walls are painted roughcast 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 a square-headed opening at right with a replacement timber-panelled door, a single window at left, and a central gabled dormer to the attic flanked at right by a rooflight. The south gable is abutted by the neighbouring property HB10/07/009M, and the north gable is abutted by HB10/07/009O. The west elevation is occupied by the extension and contains single uPVC casement windows at each floor level and a square-headed uPVC door at ground floor left. 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 vertically-sheeted timber gate. The guttering and downpipes are cast iron, half-round gutters and round downpipes.

The ground floor return has been remodelled and extended to include first floor accommodation around 1985. The building first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1905 as part of a terrace of houses along Alexandra Place. Valuation Revisions of 1879 record that houses were in progress at that date, with numbers 3-20 valued at £2 10 shillings each, listed as "house, office and yard" with various occupiers.

Sion Mills was a company-owned village established by Herdman & Co., a flax spinning mill operated by the Herdman family as a model village for their workers and village maintenance staff. The village offered healthcare to residents until privatisation 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 more than 500. The cottages are part of a planned layout similar to the work of Sir Titus Salt at Saltaire. The simple but well-built one-storey terraced cottages were constructed to house workers and save them from walking miles to their employment.

Until the 1960s, the mill trained and employed people to cover all necessary trades needed to maintain and repair the village houses and surroundings as well as the mill, its machinery, and the waterpower system. Householders were charged fortnightly rent and gas payments, raised occasionally. The Herdmans provided a shop with fair prices and a dispensary. Workers paid a small amount from their wages—one penny per week in the early days, sixpence in the 1940s—towards healthcare, and the mill paid a doctor and a mill nurse. The Herdmans also built a doctor's house and surgery on Mill Lane at the end of the 19th century. The village maintained its own fire service and fire engine.

Due to alterations and extensions to this house and those in the adjoining terrace, the small-scale houses have lost considerable architectural character both individually and as a group. Despite this, their general massing and historic interest mean they continue to contribute to the Sion Mills Conservation Area.