9 Charlemont Square West, Bessbrook, Co.Armagh

9 Charlemont Square West, Bessbrook, County Armagh

This is a modest two-storey, two-bay mid-Victorian mid-terrace house, built around 1862 by an unknown architect. It forms part of the western terrace of Charlemont Square, a formally planned square of 66 buildings arranged on three sides around a central green. The listing covers the house, its gate, and its railings.

Architectural Character

The house is well proportioned and built in random-coursed, rock-faced local Newry Granodiorite — a high-quality granite quarried on the former Charlemont Estate and used throughout Bessbrook. The same stone was used in the construction of Manchester Town Hall and the great steps of St. George's Hall in Liverpool. Window and door openings have painted red brick dressings, painted stone cills, and stepped painted smooth-rendered surrounds; all openings are square-headed. The pitched roof is finished in fibre cement slates with angled black clay ridge tiles. There is a rectangular red brick chimney stack to the northwest with two black clay pots. The eaves are flush with a red brick corbel course. Rainwater goods are uPVC, with half-round guttering to the front elevation and shaped box guttering discharging to square-section downpipes at the rear.

The front elevation faces northeast, is near-symmetrical, and sits flush with the main terrace line. At ground floor level there is a window opening to the northwest side and an eight-panelled varnished timber door with brass furniture to the southeast side, with a square-headed fanlight above. At first floor level there are two windows aligned with the ground floor openings below. The original windows have been replaced with uPVC casement units. A modest paved front yard is enclosed by a smooth cement-rendered dwarf wall topped by plain hooped painted metal railings, with a matching foot gate hung on slim posts to the southeast. A concrete path leads from the gate to the front door.

To the northwest, the building is attached to No. 10 Charlemont Square West; to the southeast, it is attached to No. 8 Charlemont Square West. The rear southwest elevation is of limited accessibility, but where visible it shows a single-bay two-storey rear return with a pitched roof projecting to the rear boundary. This return has two-part uPVC casement windows at first floor level facing southwest, a reduced-size window at first floor level toward the northwest end, and uPVC fascia and soffit boards. A sheeted painted timber half-door with black iron furniture leads from the rear access route into a single-storey mono-pitched extension abutted to the northwest of the rear return. This mono-pitched block has a corrugated Perspex roof with a uPVC oil tank supported on modern blocks and concrete lintels above. The rear elevation is generally finished in painted roughcast cement render with uPVC rainwater goods and uPVC casement windows. The original roof slates have been replaced and uPVC window frames were installed around 1998.

A large two-storey rear return has been added, which detracts from the building's architectural integrity.

Setting and Group Value

No. 9 forms part of Charlemont Square West, one of twenty-six houses in the western terrace (the terrace also includes one larger two-storey-with-attic shop building to the southeast). Together with the east and north terraces, the square comprises 66 buildings in total, primarily accessed from Fountain Street to the southeast. The east and west terraces are stepped in groups of two dwellings to follow the subtle relief of the site. Front facades along both terraces are nearly uniform, with five larger buildings to the southeast of Charlemont Square East and one to the southeast of Charlemont Square West having traditional shop fronts at ground floor level with dwellings above. The northern terrace is the shortest at eight houses wide, but its buildings are distinctly larger two-and-a-half-storey paired structures. Each house is set back from the public road and footpath with a modest front yard typically enclosed by a dwarf wall topped by hooped metal railings. To the rear, larger yards are generally enclosed by random-coursed rubble stone walling with a square-headed doorway opening onto a wide rear access route; rear facades are much altered with various extensions of differing shapes and sizes. The central green is now laid to lawn and enclosed by hooped galvanised metal railings with some established trees along its boundary. A children's playground is located to the southeast, including a monument to the installation of electric lighting in 1911, and Bessbrook's War Memorial is centrally located to the southeast of the playground.

Historical Background

The history of industry at Bessbrook dates to 1761, when a Mr. John Pollock opened the first woollen mill and bleach green at the site, then known simply as "The Green." The settlement was renamed Bessbrook after Pollock's wife Elizabeth (known as Bess) and the nearby Camlough River. By the 1830s, the first edition Ordnance Survey map records very few buildings — principally Mount Caulfield House and a number of thread manufactories and bleach mills.

The village as it exists today was effectively founded in 1845 when John Grubb Richardson (1813–1891), a linen merchant from Lambeg and a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), purchased one of the derelict mills and began building housing for his factory workers. Richardson, in his own words, "had a great aversion to be responsible for a factory population in a large town, so on looking around, fixed upon a place near Newry … with water power and a thick population around, and in a country district where flax was cultivated in considerable quantities." His layout of the village was influenced by the work of William Penn, the American Quaker responsible for planning Philadelphia in the late 17th century. Richardson possessed, according to the historian Harrison, a "typical Quaker mix of pragmatic and altruistic expectation to provide jobs and good working conditions for his employees," and brought the poor, the unqualified, and beggars from the surrounding countryside to work and live at Bessbrook, hoping to encourage self-improvement. He established the village as a social experiment where workers could live and work in contentment.

Bessbrook is widely known as a village without the "Three P's": Richardson stipulated there would be no public house and no pawn shop in the settlement, and therefore no need for police. In exchange, he provided recreational and educational facilities at the Institute, a number of well-stocked shops at Nos. 1–5 Charlemont Square East, and had milk, tea, and cocoa distributed to mill workers. The majority of residents voted to preserve these arrangements in the 1870s, and to this day there is no public house at Bessbrook. Police were not stationed at the village until the turn of the 20th century.

In 1863, Richardson became sole owner of the Bessbrook Spinning Company after buying out his brother's shares. The local linen industry boomed during the American Civil War (1861–65), as access to American cotton was cut off, and Richardson greatly enlarged his factory while expanding his workforce. Lord Charlemont sold the remainder of the Camlough Estate to Richardson in 1865, making Richardson the principal employer and landowner at Bessbrook. To accommodate the influx of new workers, Charlemont Square was laid out between 1862 and 1866; the population of Bessbrook rose from 637 to 2,215 between 1861 and 1871, and the number of houses rose from 73 to 296.

Charlemont Square formed the centrepiece of these new developments. The two- and two-and-a-half-storey houses were built along three sides of an open green intended as a recreational space (a tennis ground was shown within the green on the Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1906). The architect of the houses is not known with certainty; Charles Brett suggests that John Hardy, a civil engineer appointed company architect in 1881, may have carried out some work at Bessbrook in the 1860s, though his role may have been limited to the expansion of the mill buildings. The terraces were built by masons and joiners employed by the Bessbrook Spinning Company.

The second edition Ordnance Survey map (1861) does not depict Charlemont Square, but construction had commenced by 1862. Griffith's Valuation of that year noted that Charlemont Square West — captioned "new row" — was the only completed side of the square, though all 26 buildings remained unoccupied. The remaining sides were completed and occupied by at least 1866. Each house was owned by the Bessbrook Spinning Company and contained between three and five rooms. Tenants were required to sign an agreement stipulating, among other things, that fowl and pigs were not to be kept in the living quarters or yard (though a pigsty and fowl-run were permitted in the garden), and that children were obliged to attend school until old enough for mill work.

No. 9 Charlemont Square West was initially let by the Bessbrook Spinning Company to a Mr. David Jamphrey at a value of £5 and 10 shillings. Occupants changed frequently over subsequent decades, though the valuation remained unaltered until the 1950s. The Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1906 depicts the building in its current layout. The 1911 Census records the house as a second-class dwelling of five rooms, occupied by John Foy, a general labourer whose entire family were employed by the Bessbrook Spinning Company as linen preparers and spinners. Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57), the house was occupied by Ms. Adelaide Nesbitt, who remained at the address until at least the 1970s.

During the 20th century the mill continued to expand and gained international recognition. During the Second World War, mill workers supplied cloth for uniforms. The Bessbrook Spinning Company retained ownership of housing along Charlemont Square until the 1960s, when the dwellings began to be sold to private individuals and firms; the majority were purchased by C. R. Morrow, a local car and farm machinery dealer, around 1970. The sale of property was necessitated by the post-war downturn in the local textile market, which foreshadowed the closure of the mill in 1972 (after which the building was occupied by the British Army). No. 9 was purchased outright by Ms. Nesbitt in 1968 and its value was increased to £7 and 10 shillings under the Second General Revaluation (1956–72).

The building was listed in 1981 and was included in the Bessbrook Conservation Area, designated in 1983 in recognition of Bessbrook's "historical significance as a planned mill village and its distinct form and character." Bessbrook is internationally significant as an early planned mill village begun in the 1840s, predating the famous English model villages of Saltaire (1852), Port Sunlight (1888), and Bourneville (developed by the Cadbury family in 1895), all of which are recognised as having "directly influenced town and country planning all over the world."