The Manchester Bar, 4 Station Road, Larne, Co Antrim, BT40 3AA

The Manchester Bar is a late Victorian public house on Station Road, Larne, most likely dating from the 1880s or early 1890s. It is a three-storey gabled stuccoed building painted pale green, with prominent attic dormers and a pilastered ground floor. The main entrance faces north.

The roof is covered in Bangor blue slates laid in regular courses, with red terracotta ridge tiles, and runs continuously with the adjoining house to the right. Moulded cast iron guttering is arranged in three sections on a stuccoed dentil cornice on each side of and between the two dormers; three rectangular-section cast iron gutters discharge into a full-width moulded cast iron gutter at dormer cill level. A PVC downpipe runs at the party line with the adjoining house, painted to match it, and continues to ground level.

The two attic dormers are segmental-headed with moulded copings, a central ball finial to each, and a blank medallion in the wall space above each window. The stucco to the dormer gables is badly cracking, with some missing to the right-hand one. Each dormer window is segmental-headed and contains a pair of timber side-hung casements with a toplight over. A plat band sits below the full-width gutter.

At first floor level, the four windows are semi-circular headed, with slightly wider spacing between the second and third. They have moulded arches, keystones, and a moulded string course running across the building at arch-springing level. Each window consists of a pair of rectangular timber casements beneath a semi-circular headed toplight, with painted stucco cills.

The ground floor facade has four openings — two large rectangular plate glass fixed lights, one on each side of the main entrance doorway, with a second doorway at the right-hand end — all bounded and divided by five stuccoed pilasters with fluted capitals and moulded cornices. The windows carry etched cornucopia designs with running vine borders above them. Each large window has a painted stone cill and a blind rectangular panel below, set in a moulded surround. An offset plinth with a coved moulding runs across the full width of the building at the base.

The main bar entrance is set slightly back between the two large windows. It has a two-leaf wooden door, each leaf of two panels, with a raised and fielded fluted panel below a blank panel. Above the door is a semi-circular fanlight in a rectangular wooden surround, with an ornamentally carved keystone, scrolling motifs to the spandrels and frieze, and a moulded cornice to the door head. The fanlight is glazed with tinted leaded glass incorporating a ribbon design, though the inscription has been removed; the glass is damaged. The concrete doorstep is original. The doorway at the right-hand end of the facade is similar in form but has a single six-panel leaf, all raised, fielded, and fluted; part of the moulded surround to the bottom right-hand panel is missing. Original brass letterbox and door handle survive. The fanlight above this door retains its leaded glazing intact, with a ribbon inscribed "Family Department"; a small portion of fretwork in the spandrel is missing. At the left-hand end of the ground floor facade, a square PVC downpipe sits in the angle with the projecting basalt wall of the neighbouring market yard. A concrete area extends across the full width of the building's frontage.

Across the top of the ground floor pilasters, the name of the bar is painted in ornamental script across a frieze that runs between pairs of coupled curved wooden brackets, with a dentil cornice above. A burglar alarm box is mounted on the frieze at the right-hand side, painted the same maroon as all other woodwork and described as unobtrusive. Between the pairs of first floor windows, a flagpole mount and a modern sign on an iron bracket are fixed to the wall.

The east elevation is a three-storey gable finished in later dry-dash render of limestone chippings, with a stone string course or plat band at second floor level, though not of the same depth or detail as on the entrance front. The chimney on the apex is finished in painted stucco with a cornice and offsets, and carries one tall pot. Painted stone copings finish the gable. Two rectangular timber sliding sash windows, vertically hung, 1-over-1 with horns and painted cills, appear at each extremity of the attic storey. At first floor, there are two narrow rectangular windows to the left and one to the right, all encased in security grilles: the far left is a timber vertically hung sliding sash with horns, 1-over-1, incorporating margin lights; the window to its right is a timber fixed light with a top-hung vent and is a later replacement; the window to the right is a sash as the first but without margin lights. The ground floor of this elevation is obscured by the gabled shed of the adjoining market yard to the east.

Set to the left and behind the main east gable is the side wall of a two-storey rear return. Its roof is also of Bangor blue slates in regular courses. Cast iron guttering and downpipe lead to an intermediate rectangular hopper, with a PVC downpipe below. The wall is smooth cement rendered, with a similar chimney on the return gable carrying one tall pot. Two rectangular vertically hung sliding sash windows, 2-over-2 horizontally divided, have attached metal security grilles. Below the windows, a lean-to roof clad in asbestos slates encloses part of the yard, with a modern flush rooflight inserted.

The rear elevation presents the three-storey rear wall of the main house, slated as the entrance front, with cast iron and PVC guttering, a cast iron downpipe, and a cast iron soil pipe at the right-hand end. The wall is smooth cement rendered with a television satellite dish attached at first floor level. The gable of the rear return is blank cement rendered and has a projecting two-storey lean-to of similar walling, with two openings to each floor now blocked with concrete blockwork or render. To the right of the return is a smooth cement rendered gable of a further lean-to with a timber fascia. To the left of the rear return, a monopitch-roofed return belonging to the adjoining property (number 6) cuts into the rear lean-to roof; its walls are dry-dashed to match the rest of the rear elevation of that property, which has been generally modernised. The rear yard has a concrete surface. Its boundary walls consist, to the east, of basalt and concrete block and basalt and firebrick walls of the adjoining market yard; to the south, red brick and basalt and limestone rubble walling of an outbuilding with a large coach entrance, all in poor condition, with corrugated iron doors set in rubble walling with brick infill; and to the west within the yard, a red brick wall.

The building stands at the end of a long terrace within the built-up area of the town, with the market yard to one side. The adjoining house to the west, now converted into flats, has a roof continuous with the pub and was clearly integral with it originally: it is a similarly styled three-storey building with two dormers, displaying identical detailing to one dormer, to the first floor windows, and to the doorway, but it also has an original first floor oriel window, replacement windows elsewhere, and is painted a different colour. The rest of the terrace is of varied form, quality, and colour.

A front block and a rear block both appear on the Ordnance Survey map of 1857, but stylistically the front block reads as a work of the 1880s or early 1890s and is most likely a late Victorian remodelling or possibly a complete replacement of an earlier Victorian building. The premises are marked as the Manchester Hotel on the 1893 Ordnance Survey map. An undated contemporary photograph, in which the title panel is blank, shows the building as the premises of Thomas Robinson; Robinson was first listed as a spirit merchant at the Manchester Hotel in the Ulster Directory of 1902, though other members of the Robinson family had been listed as innkeepers in Larne from 1877 through to the 1890s. The building therefore appears to have been constructed for a member of the Robinson family, though the evidence as to which one is inconclusive.

The front facade is well preserved and in virtually unaltered form, and the interior retains a range of ornamented features characteristic of the period. However, later alterations to the bar interior detract from its period character, and further alterations to the rear of the building have eroded its overall quality.