Lagan Valley Hospital, South Eastern Health and Social Care Trust, 39 Hillsborough Road, Lisburn, Co. Antrim, BT28 1JPP

Lagan Valley Hospital — Former Lisburn Union Workhouse

This is a symmetrical, multi-bay, two-storey stone former workhouse with an attic storey, built around 1840 to designs by George Wilkinson, architect to the Irish Poor Law Commissioners. It stands on the east side of Hillsborough Road, Lisburn, set back from the road and oriented on a north-south axis. The building was converted to a district hospital in 1920 and is now partially occupied by the Lagan Valley Hospital. It is of considerable historic and social importance to the Lisburn area.

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The main west-facing front block is thirteen windows wide, with a breakfront three-storey double-gabled block two windows wide projecting at either end. Three windows are grouped at the centre to form a central section, above which sit three dormer windows in the roof. The central section contains the main entrance: a segmental-arched door opening formed in redbrick, with a bowtel moulding and a terracotta hood moulding with decorative label stops. The current doors are replacement timber panelled and glazed units with sidelights and overlights. Abutting the gabled end blocks is a further segmental-headed door opening formed in painted redbrick, fitted with replacement hardwood panelled doors and what appear to be original sidelights and a tripartite overlight.

Roofs are pitched natural slate with black clay ridge tiles. The central section has dormer windows, and there are some redbrick chimneystacks. Replacement moulded iron guttering is fixed to timber eaves, with square-profile iron downpipes; the rafter feet are exposed on the side elevations. The walls are constructed of rough-hewn squared basalt with a chamfered stone plinth course and tooled ashlar quoins, now painted. Window openings are square-headed, formed in redbrick (also now painted), with red sandstone sills and replacement aluminium windows.

The north side elevation is three windows wide, has no windows at second-floor level, and has a central door opening. The south side elevation mirrors the north. The rear elevation is generally rendered and largely obscured by a series of gabled and flat-roofed extensions. Projecting at a right angle from the rear is a central single-storey stone spine wing, detailed in the same manner as the front elevation. This spine wing is terminated by a further two-storey stone wing, to which a two-storey redbrick wing is attached. The two-storey stone block retains one original 2/2 timber sash window and a round-arched former carriage arch opening in its southernmost bay. The south elevation of the single-storey spine wing is abutted by a lean-to extension with rendered walling. Together, these elements form an H-plan.

The building has been extensively renovated, altered and extended throughout the 20th century, including the addition of a multi-storey hospital building to the north dating from the 1960s. Despite losing its original windows and most of its interior fabric through these successive refurbishments, the building retains something of its original institutional floor plan and a fine imperial staircase.

SETTING

The building faces west onto Hillsborough Road, set on an H-plan. The front area has been given over to car parking, with a tarmac drive encircling the entire building and several later temporary and modern structures on the site. To the east stands the former Fever Hospital, built and detailed in the same manner as the principal building, now in use as a day nursery.

HISTORY AND SIGNIFICANCE

The Lisburn Union Workhouse was completed on 1 January 1841 and was intended to house 800 inmates. The total cost was £6,200 for the building and £1,358 for fittings. It was built under the provisions of the Poor Law (Ireland) Act of 1838, which followed similar legislation in England and Wales and divided Ireland into a number of Poor Law Unions — each centred on a market town and each required to provide a workhouse for the destitute.

George Wilkinson, who had previously designed a small number of workhouses in England, was appointed architect to the Irish Poor Law Commissioners in 1839 and held the post until 1855. Between 1840 and 1853, one hundred and sixty-three workhouses were built across Ireland, all variations on Wilkinson's designs, which came in three sizes. One hundred and sixty-three workhouses were built in Ireland between 1840 and 1853. Whether the Lisburn workhouse was classified as small, medium or large is a matter on which published authorities differ: O'Connor suggests that a workhouse for 800 inmates would have been "large", while Gould holds that any workhouse whose central main building was only two storeys high was "small". The Lisburn workhouse appears from the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1857 to have followed Wilkinson's standard design closely, with only a few variations: two substantial wings to the north and south of the entrance building (since demolished) and a large wing running west to east abutting the infirmary, which may have been a later addition.

The cost of each Irish workhouse was only two-thirds of the equivalent cost in England and Wales. This was achieved by laying floors of mortar or earth, providing sleeping platforms rather than beds, whitewashing the rough stone walls rather than plastering them, and omitting ceilings from the dormitories. Wilkinson nevertheless sought to make his buildings as visually pleasing and unobtrusive as possible. In his architectural report he wrote: "The style in which the buildings are designed admits of execution best suited to the nature of the materials with which the country generally abounds. The carboniferous or mountain limestone has an irregular fracture suited for the mode of execution generally known as rubble masonry, with which the walls are proposed to be constructed; and which, in point of strength and durability, is equally suited for the building with dressed stone or ashlar work, and would have a more characteristic appearance. The necessarily conspicuous situation, which many of the buildings must occupy, suggests the above style as the least obtrusive; while its gabled roofs and elevated chimney shafts give it a pleasing and picturesque appearance. The windows are constructed with mullions and transome heads and diamond lights." In doing so, Wilkinson was deliberately drawing on the Tudor and Jacobean almshouse tradition in England.

In 1845, as famine and disease began to spread across Ireland, the Poor Law Commissioners began ordering the construction of fever hospitals within workhouse grounds in areas where none already existed. A tender for the fever hospital at Lisburn was accepted in 1847, and the building appears to the rear of the workhouse complex on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1858.

Griffith's Valuation of 1856–64 lists the Union Workhouse, offices and land as occupied by the Poor Law Guardians. Several subsidiary buildings are recorded, including a washhouse, kitchen, laundry, workroom, nursery, penitentiary, infirmary, fever hospital, dead house and forge. The valuation was assessed at £300, later raised to £392, probably reflecting additions made to the complex at around that time.

A Scottish visitor who toured a number of Poor Law unions in the north of Ireland in 1852 and published his account in the Glasgow Herald described the Lisburn workhouse as follows: "The house is of very tasteful architecture with long avenues and spaces of ground on all sides blooming with vegetation. Nothing could exceed the milk-white cleanliness of the floors, walls, doors and other furniture of the establishment. There are 15 acres of ground attached to it, which are kept in an excellent state of cultivation by the master, without any assistants but the paupers."

The workhouse system in Northern Ireland was ended in 1948, though most of the smaller workhouses had already been converted to district hospitals by that time, encouraged by government legislation. The Lisburn Workhouse closed on 13 April 1918 and became the Lisburn and Hillsborough District Hospital in 1920, subsequently renamed the Lagan Valley Hospital. Annual Revision records show a substantial increase in assessed value to £480 in 1922, indicating that additions and remodelling had taken place on conversion to hospital use.

The original front building of the workhouse was demolished in 1967. The surviving main building — which would originally have housed boys' and girls' schools, officers' quarters and adult wards — remains, though the dormer windows have been reduced to three in number. Parts of the dining hall and infirmary buildings to the rear also appear to survive, together with the fever hospital.