8 Bridge St., Rostrevor, Co.Down

8 Bridge Street, Rostrevor, County Down

This house and shop is shown developed on the Ordnance Survey map of 1834. The 1835-36 valuation records it as a house and shop then occupied by Alexander Kerr, measuring 15½ feet by 20½ feet by 17 feet in height, with an adjoining section featuring a gateway to the eastern end measuring 10½ by 20½ by 8 feet, and an office to the rear of 17 by 14½ by 16½ feet. The valuers classed the property as 'not new', suggesting it was already known to be over 25 years old at that point.

By 1861, the building was recorded as 'a small shop…closed up and used chiefly as a store house now', then held by Charles Sloan, who at the same time also occupied the neighbouring public house (present number 10). The dimensions were given as 6 yards 1 foot by 6 yards 2 feet by 2 storeys, and the section with the archway had become part of number 10. In 1866, however, the rateable valuation of number 8 was raised from £5 to £10-10-0, while that of number 10 decreased from £19 to £14 and Charles Sloan gave up the lease on the latter. This indicates that the section with the archway was reunited with number 8, an arrangement confirmed by later photographs from the 19th and 20th centuries.

Throughout the latter 19th and early 20th centuries, the property passed through various occupants: Miss Laird (1872), William McCumisky (1874), Mary Moody (1878), Thomas Keenan (1881 and 1884), Charles Sloan (1883), William Kaye (1892), and Thomas McGuffin (by 1909). The 1911 census records Thomas McGuffin as a 31-year-old master bootmaker living here with his wife Jane and four young children. He was succeeded by Bernard Fegan (1914), Mary McConnell (1922), Charles Sloan again (1923 and 1926, when he held the leases of both this property and number 10), Theresa Coyne (1925), and James Donnan (1928). Mary Donnan and Elizabeth Jordan were listed as residents in 1936, with Ruth Jordan remaining from 1953 until at least 1972. Numbers 8 and 6 Bridge Street were surveyed as separate properties during the First Survey of Historic Buildings in December 1969 and listed as such in September 1981. They were subsequently amalgamated sometime between 1981 and 1994.

Bridge Street originated as part of the road from Kilkeel, connecting that town with the original routes to Rathfriland (present Greenpark Road) and Newry (a route which appears to have followed present Warrenpoint Road before heading inland along today's Rath, Donaghguy and Greenan Roads). Oliver Sloane's County Down map of 1739 shows Rostrevor's settlement comprising solely of buildings along the northeastern side of the road, suggesting this side of Bridge Street may mark the earliest part of the village. Development on both sides of the street appears on an estate map of 1767 and Williamson's 1810 county map, reaching its present extent by the 1834 first edition Ordnance Survey map. Known in the 1830s as 'Post Office Street' due to the presence of a post office, the name was modified to 'Old Post Office Street' by 1861, and finally changed to 'Bridge Street' around 1894. The 1836 Ordnance Survey Memoirs describe the street as 'leading from the centre of the main street in a south easterly direction to the bridge of Rostrevor…155 yards long, 95 feet broad at its broadest or north and western end and 25 feet at its narrowest part next the bridge. The houses are of 2-storeys, in good order, all used for shops and having furnished lodgings for the accommodation of strangers.'

The building is located within a conservation area.