Piney Ridge, Knockbracken Healthcare Park, Saintfield Road, Belfast, County Down, BT8 8BH

Piney Ridge is a two-storey, three-bay semi-detached former house with outbuildings, now used as an office, built in 1936 to designs by the Belfast architects Tulloch & Fitzsimons and constructed by contractors Stewart and Partners. It stands to the north side of the Knockbracken Healthcare Park complex, west of Saintfield Road in the borough of Castlereagh. The building forms one of a pair of semi-detached dwellings and is of interest both in its own right and as part of the wider Belfast Villa Colony Asylum complex (a group of ten listed structures).

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The building has an L-shaped plan with a box bay to the front, an additional bay to the north, and a projecting stairwell bay to the rear. A small rear return is abutted by an extension and a garage opening to the south. The hipped roof is covered in natural slate with terracotta ridge tiles and finials, and red-brick chimneystacks. Cast-iron ogee rainwater goods and hoppers sit on projecting eaves with exposed rafter ends. The external walls are painted roughcast render on a smooth render plinth.

Windows throughout are original metal-framed casements with projecting masonry sills. Those on the ground floor have Art Nouveau leaded and stained glass panels to the top lights. The stairwell window to the rear has six leaded and stained glass panels. The box bay to the front has a brick base and a slated roof.

The principal elevation faces west. At its centre is the main entrance, which comprises an original round-headed, multi-paned metal door with a multi-paned transom and side-lights, all set in a painted brick surround with springers and accessed via two masonry steps. Above the entrance is a two-light window at first-floor level. To the left of the entrance is a three-light window at first floor and a four-light window at ground floor. To the right, the projecting box bay has a six-light window at ground floor and a three-light window at first floor.

The north elevation is abutted by the adjoining building. The east (rear) elevation is five windows wide at ground floor. At first floor there is a modern fire-exit to the right of centre, flanked by two two-light windows and a further window to the far left. The projecting stairwell bay to the left contains the stairwell window and a modern timber door at ground level, accessed via three masonry steps. To the far right is a small rear return with a first-floor window, which is abutted by the extension; the extension in turn is abutted by a slated garage opening to the south.

The south elevation has a single window at first floor and a two-light window at ground floor. The projecting bay at the right of this elevation has a five-light bow window at ground floor and a two-paned window at first floor. On the west face of this projecting bay there are two-light windows at both first and ground floor, the ground-floor window replacing an earlier doorway and retaining a brick surround with a keystone. The east face of the projecting bay is blank.

INTERIOR

Despite the change of use from residential to office accommodation, the internal floor plan is largely unchanged.

SETTING

The building is sited to the north of the Knockbracken Healthcare complex and is visible from the Cairnshill Road to the northeast. It is accessed from the south via a narrow tarmacadamed road, with lawned areas to the remaining three sides and tarmac parking on all sides. The building is surrounded by mature trees and the setting is largely unspoiled.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The site has its origins in the Purdysburn estate. Following the deaths of Narcissus and Emily Batt, the house and demesne of 295 acres were sold in 1894 to Belfast Corporation for £29,500 for use as a lunatic asylum. The house was adapted for this purpose by architects Jackson and Tilley, following a competition won by them in 1897. In 1902 a further 88 acres — the site of the present buildings — was acquired from Mr John Morrow, and further purchases of adjoining land were made in 1904, 1911, 1917 and 1919, bringing the total owned by the Corporation to 554 acres. Sixty-five acres were allocated for an Infectious Diseases Hospital, with the remainder retained as asylum property.

A Fever Hospital was built to designs by Young and Mackenzie on part of the estate to the west of the house, opening in 1906. Originally known as the Purdysburn Fever Hospital and later as Belvoir Park Hospital, it served as the main regional centre for oncology until its closure in 2006, when cancer treatment was transferred to the City Hospital.

In 1900, the Management Committee of the Lunatic Asylum decided, on the advice of their Medical Superintendent Dr William Graham, to build a new asylum on the villa colony principle. This approach aimed to accommodate patients in homely villas and to permit classification according to mental and physical condition. Tulloch & Fitzsimons of Belfast were appointed as architects, but as work progressed the committee drew on the expertise of George Thomas Hine, Consulting Architect to the English Lunacy Commissioners.

Hine was a specialist in asylum architecture, which he regarded as almost a distinct profession in itself. In 1887 he won the competition for the Claybury asylum in Essex for the London County Council, whose compact arrow-plan design became the model for asylum planning and established his career as one of the most successful asylum architects of his time. He held his post as Consulting Architect to the Commissioners in Lunacy from 1897 and designed four major London County Council asylums housing over 200 patients each, as well as several county asylums and additions to many others. His designs after 1902 — in particular Long Grove in Epsom (1903–7) and Purdysburn (1907–13) — often feature dispersed units, and Purdysburn is one of the only mental illness facilities to make use of the colony design. The First World War marked the beginning of a decline in large asylum building programmes in the United Kingdom.

A dwelling already on the site, Glenavon, was adapted for 30 patients, and two further villas were built in 1902–3 for chronic cases, with two more completed in 1906. In 1907 the Asylum committee authorised the architects to prepare plans for a new Villa Colony Asylum including four more villas, two churches, a recreation hall and a mortuary, with Hine as consulting architect and Graeme Watt & Tulloch as supervising architects. Work commenced in 1908, with considerable alteration of the site's contours carried out using patient labour. The estimated cost was £81,000 and the contractors were H & J Martin and Messrs Robert Corry Ltd.

The 1911 census shows that by that point five villas were occupied by patients — four newly built, each housing around 55 patients, and one adapted from a former house on the site, occupied by 33 patients. A further 171 patients were accommodated in the former Purdysburn House, meaning the total number had almost tripled since the 1901 census, driven by a more than fourfold increase in female patients. Only male patients were housed in the villas, while Purdysburn House became reserved for women. In 1911 a tender from Messrs Robert Corry Ltd was accepted for two further villas at a cost of £9,790, and by 1913 these were occupied by working patients transferred from Grosvenor Road Asylum.

Additions continued to be made to the site, with further building phases planned in 1924–5, 1933–6 and 1938–9, all designed by Tulloch & Fitzsimons. Piney Ridge was built as part of the 1933–6 phase of expansion, which also included the Grahamholme infirmary and reception block. By 1937 there were 17 villas accommodating 1,320 patients, together with a hospital for 146 and a sanatorium for 22 patients.

Belfast's earlier asylum, built on the site now occupied by the Royal Victoria Hospital, had been constructed in 1829 and demolished in the 1920s after closing in 1917. It was of a prison-like design comprising numerous single cells with small, heavily barred windows and high surrounding walls intended to protect the public from the inmates. It was enlarged in 1860 but could accommodate only 346 patients. Those who could not be housed there were sent to workhouses or, if considered dangerous, to gaol. The classification of mental disorders was simplistic, with only four categories recognised: lunatics (curable and incurable), epileptics, and idiots. It was not until 1895 that epileptics began to be treated in infirmaries rather than asylums.

By 1929, Purdysburn mansion house and its courtyard buildings accommodated over 150 female patients, and the hospital block for sick or infirm patients contained 100 beds (50 male and 50 female), along with Medical Officers', Matron's and Nurses' apartments, a laboratory and dental rooms. The villas were self-contained, home-like structures, each with its own kitchen, designed to house 55 patients, though numbers sometimes exceeded this. Within the extensive grounds, patients were encouraged to work on the dairy and poultry farm, and an orchard and walled gardens produced large quantities of fruit, jam and vegetables; over eight tons of jam were made on site in 1929.

In the 1990s, management and clinicians decided to rename Purdysburn — partly to dispel negative associations attached to the name — and the site became known as Knockbracken Healthcare Park. The site is now shared with approximately thirty voluntary organisations working in the healthcare field, and the headquarters of the Belfast Trust is also located there. Patient numbers peaked at over 1,800 in the mid-1950s but have since fallen to around 300, largely as a result of changes in mental health provision and an increased emphasis on community-based care.

SIGNIFICANCE

Architectural detailing is largely intact, retaining several characteristic 1930s features including the Art Nouveau leaded and stained glass panels and the original metal-framed entrance door. Together with the adjacent and similarly well-preserved villa Wyndurst, Piney Ridge is a notable example of domestic asylum architecture and of the work of Tulloch & Fitzsimons as prominent local architects. The buildings are primarily of interest, however, for their group value as part of the Belfast Villa Colony Asylum complex.