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

3 Alexandra Place is an end-of-terrace one-and-a-half-storey house built around 1880 as worker's housing for Herdman's Mill, located on the west side of Melmount Road in Sion Mills. The building is now a two-bay single-storey house with a rectangular plan and a two-storey flat-roofed extension to the west, added around 1985.

The pitched roof is finished with natural slate and blue-black clay ridge tiles over deep overhanging eaves, with decorative timber bargeboards. A roughcast chimney with concrete coping and replacement clay pots rises from the structure. The walls are painted roughcast over smooth banded plinth.

Windows are replacement square-headed uPVC casements set in smooth rendered architraves with painted masonry sills. The principal elevation faces east and contains a square-headed opening with smooth rendered architrave and replacement vertically sheeted timber door at right, with a single window at left. A central gabled dormer to the attic is flanked by a rooflight to the right. The south gable is blank and abuts the extension at left, which contains a single first-floor window. The west elevation is abutted by the extension, which contains a single window at each floor and a square-headed uPVC door at ground-floor left. The north gable is abutted by neighbouring property HB10/07/009D.

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 manage rainwater.

The building forms part of a terrace dating from around 1880. The ground floor return was remodelled and extended to include first-floor accommodation around 1985. The house first appears on the third edition Ordnance Survey map of 1905 as part of a terrace along Alexandra Place. Valuation Revisions from 1879 note that houses were in progress, with numbers 3-20 valued at £2 10 shillings 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 run by the Herdman family as a model village for their workers and village maintenance staff. The village offered workers options for healthcare 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 workers, who numbered upwards of 500 by 1853. The cottages are part of a planned layout similar to Sir Titus Salt's work at Saltaire.

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

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