Creamery building (off Alderwood Hill), Knockbracken Healthcare Park, Saintfield Road, Belfast BT8 8BH

Former Creamery Building, Knockbracken Healthcare Park (formerly Purdysburn Hospital), Belfast

This is a former creamery built around 1909–10, forming part of the farm complex associated with what was then the Belfast District Asylum. It was probably designed by local architects Graeme Watt and Tulloch and is a rare and remarkably intact survival from an era when the hospital site operated as a largely self-sufficient community. Most original features remain in place, including interior glazed brick walling, terrazzo flooring, ironmongery, and a hand-operated pump.

The building is laid out on an unusual hexagonal plan, with a rectangular annexe attached to the rear. It sits on a quiet northern corner of the Knockbracken Healthcare Park site, surrounded by land that was historically used for grazing livestock, and is located immediately south-east of the adjacent farm buildings, just south of Alderwood Hill Road. Together, the creamery and farm buildings form a cohesive group set within an almost semi-rural landscape to the north-west of the main hospital site.

The main elevation faces south-west and is accessed by steps flanked by low brick walls with chamfered slate-topped concrete coping. The annexe is entered through a separate door to the rear. A former doorway that once connected the two rooms has since been infilled, and an external stairwell on the north side leads down to an underground space. The exterior walls are built in red brick laid in English garden wall bond over a projecting bevelled brick plinth course. The main entrance features a camber-headed door opening with brick voussoirs, containing timber sheeted doors under a transom. The rear annexe has a square-headed door opening with plain reveals over a concrete step. Windows throughout are camber-headed with brick voussoirs, plain reveals, and sloping cast concrete cills, each containing four-paned timber double casement windows. The hexagonal roof is covered in natural slate and is finished with a stepped brick cornice at the eaves; the rear annexe has terracotta ridge tiles and cast-iron rainwater goods.

The building's historical significance is considerable. The Belfast District Asylum was established in the late 1890s in the grounds of Purdysburn House, initially to relieve overcrowding at the long-established asylum off Grosvenor Road, which had been built in 1829. Patients were first housed in the old 18th-century mansion on the site, but in 1900 Dr William Graham, Medical Superintendent of the Committee of Management of Purdysburn Lunatic Asylum, persuaded the committee to build their new asylum on the "Villa Colony" principle. This approach was modelled on the Austrian State Mental Hospital and was founded on the belief that a high standard of comfortable, homely accommodation combined with meaningful activity was beneficial to the rehabilitation of people suffering from mental illness. Construction of the new complex began in 1902 and continued to be extended until the late 1930s. Much of the design work was carried out by local architects Graeme Watt and Tulloch — and subsequently by the firm's later iterations of Watt, Tulloch and Fitzsimons, and Tulloch and Watt — working in conjunction with English architect George Thomas Hine, who specialised in asylum design. Purdysburn was one of the earliest and most fully realised examples of the villa colony principle in the United Kingdom, and the only one of its kind in Ireland.

Over the course of the 19th century, productive physical labour had gradually come to be seen as important to the healing process for patients with mental illness. At Purdysburn, many residents were put to work producing food both for themselves and for the institution as a whole. The presence of a farm at the site is mentioned in a short article about milk production in the Belfast News-Letter of 9 June 1905, though this does not necessarily mean the creamery or the farm buildings to the immediate north were yet complete. The construction of farm buildings appears to have been formally approved by the Corporation only in June 1908, as part of a broader ambition to create what was described as "the best and most up-to-date asylum in the United Kingdom." The buildings must have been finished by late 1910, when a Belfast News-Letter report of 15 November that year refers to "farm buildings now completed," and stabling is recorded in the valuation book for the following year. The creamery and farm buildings thus formed part of a large expansion of the institution that took place around 1907–11, which also saw the construction of two churches, a recreation hall, and a mortuary.

The number of patients at Purdysburn peaked at over 1,800 in the mid-1950s. However, as mental health policy shifted during the later 20th century towards treating people within the community, patient numbers fell sharply. By the late 1960s the farm had become largely redundant, and in 1969, as part of a new policy of hospitals dispensing with livestock farming, a decision was taken to close it entirely. Since around 1970, the former farm buildings appear to have been used as an ambulance station and later also as an equestrian centre. The creamery itself has remained largely disused and, for some local people, its original function has been mistakenly assumed to have been that of a folly.

The site is now known as Knockbracken Healthcare Park and is shared between various healthcare organisations. The creamery, standing alone, serves as a physical reminder of a time when the hospital site was self-sufficient. Its importance is considerably greater, however, when understood in the context of the adjacent farm buildings and the wider hospital complex, all of which together supported the villa colony concept and reflect a significant development in mental healthcare provision, not only in Belfast but across Northern Ireland as a whole.