16 Charlemont Square East, Bessbrook, Co.Armagh

No. 16 Charlemont Square East is a modest two-storey, two-bay mid-Victorian terraced house built between 1862 and 1866, forming part of the planned village of Bessbrook, County Armagh. The listing covers the house together with its gate, railings and yard walling.

HISTORICAL AND SOCIAL CONTEXT

Bessbrook's origins as an industrial settlement date to 1761, when a Mr. John Pollock opened the first woollen mill and bleach green on a site then simply known as "The Green." The site was renamed Bessbrook in honour of Pollock's wife Elizabeth ("Bess") and the nearby Camlough River ("Brook"). By the time of the first Ordnance Survey map in the 1830s, the settlement remained modest, with little more than Mount Caulfield House and a handful of thread manufactories and bleach mills recorded.

The village as it is known today was effectively founded in 1845, when John Grubb Richardson (1813–1891), a Quaker linen merchant from Lambeg, purchased one of the derelict mills on the site and began constructing housing for his factory workers. Richardson later explained that he had "a great aversion to be responsible for a factory population in a large town" and chose Bessbrook for its water power, available workforce, and surrounding flax-growing countryside. 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's intentions were explicitly philanthropic. He brought workers from the surrounding countryside — including the poor and destitute — hoping to improve their living conditions and, in his view, their habits. Bessbrook became known as a village without the "Three P's": there was no public house, no pawn shop, and therefore, Richardson argued, no need for police. In place of these, Richardson provided recreational and educational facilities at the village Institute, well-stocked shops at Nos. 1–5 Charlemont Square East, and arranged for milk, tea and cocoa to be distributed to mill workers. The majority of the population voted to preserve the ban on alcohol in the 1870s, and to this day no public house exists in Bessbrook. Police were not stationed in the village until the turn of the 20th century.

In 1863, Richardson became the sole owner of the Bessbrook Spinning Company after buying out his brother's shares. The local linen industry experienced a major boom during the American Civil War (1861–65), when the blockade of Southern ports cut off access to American cotton and greatly increased demand for linen. Richardson expanded both his factory and his workforce significantly during this period. In 1865, Lord Charlemont sold the remainder of the Camlough Estate to Richardson, making him by the mid-1860s both the principal employer and the dominant landowner in Bessbrook. Between 1861 and 1871, the village population rose from 637 to 2,215, and the number of houses from 73 to 296.

Charlemont Square was laid out between 1862 and 1866 to accommodate this influx of workers. Charles Brett describes it as the centrepiece of the new developments at Bessbrook. The houses were built by masons and joiners employed directly by the Bessbrook Spinning Company. The architect of the majority of Bessbrook's housing is not known with certainty, though Brett suggests that John Hardy, a civil engineer appointed as company architect in 1881, may have been involved in some earlier work in the 1860s; his role may, however, have been largely confined to the expansion of the mill buildings themselves.

Each house in the square was owned by the Bessbrook Spinning Company and contained between three and five rooms. Tenants were required to sign agreements stipulating, among other things, that fowl and pigs were not to be kept in the yard or family quarters (though a pig-sty and fowl-run were permitted in the garden), and that children must be sent to school until they were old enough to work in the mill.

Charlemont Square is now recognised as internationally significant, predating the famous English model villages of Saltaire (1852), Port Sunlight (1888) and Bourneville (developed by the Cadbury family from 1895), all of which are acknowledged to have directly influenced town and country planning worldwide. Bessbrook was designated a Conservation Area in 1983 in recognition of its historical significance as a planned mill village.

HISTORY OF NO. 16 SPECIFICALLY

No. 16 Charlemont Square East was constructed between 1862 and 1866. Annual Revision records show it was initially let by the Bessbrook Spinning Company to a Mr. Samuel Adams at a rateable value of £5 and 10 shillings — a valuation that remained unchanged until the 1950s. The house appeared in its current layout on the Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1906. The 1911 Census records that the Adams family were still in residence, employed as damask designers and machine fitters at Richardson's factory; the census classified the house as a second-class dwelling containing five rooms.

Inscribed on the stonework of the rear elevation, to the right of the first-floor window, are the letters "LA" carved three times alongside the date 1899 — almost certainly the mark of a member of the Adams family.

Under the First General Revaluation of Northern Ireland (1936–57), occupancy of No. 16 changed frequently. By 1954, a Mr. Norman Vance occupied the house and remained at the address until at least the 1970s. The Bessbrook Spinning Company retained ownership of housing in Bessbrook until the 1960s, when the mill's post-war decline in the face of a downturn in the textile market prompted the sale of properties along Charlemont Square. The majority of houses were purchased by C. R. Morrow, a local car and farm machinery dealer, around 1970. No. 16 was purchased by Morrow in that year at a rateable value of £7 and 10 shillings. The mill itself closed in 1972 and was subsequently occupied by the British Army.

No. 16 was listed in 1981. NIEA records note that its roof was reslated and its stone façade repointed around 1980, and that new sliding sash window frames were installed in 1999. At the time of the second survey the house continued to be used as a private dwelling and retained its original Victorian character, notwithstanding the addition of a single-storey flat-roofed extension to the rear.

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The house is of L-plan form, facing southwest, with a single-storey flat-roofed rear return projecting to the northeast. The walling throughout is generally random-coursed, rock-faced local Newry Granodiorite — a high-quality granite quarried on the former Charlemont Estate, the same material used in the construction of Manchester Town Hall and the great steps of St. George's Hall in Liverpool. Dressings are in red brick, with painted stone sills and stepped red brick surrounds to the cambered, gauged-brick door and window openings. The door and window heads have generally been squared off and finished with painted smooth cement render. The pitched roof is finished in fibre cement with angled black clay ridge tiles. There is a rectangular-section red brick chimney to the northwest carrying two terracotta pots. The eaves are flush, with a red brick corbel course, and the rainwater goods are generally cast iron with half-round guttering discharging to circular-section downpipes.

Principal (southwest) elevation: The front elevation is near-symmetrical and sits flush with the main terrace, which is set slightly back from the larger shop buildings at the southeastern end of the square. A modest paved front yard is enclosed by smooth rendered dwarf walling topped with hooped metal railings and a similar painted metal foot gate to the southeast. A concrete path from the gate leads to a panelled painted timber door positioned to the southeast of the façade. The door has two glazed panels to its upper half, brass furniture, and a square-headed fanlight above. The fenestration is regular: two windows at first-floor level are in line with the ground-floor openings, all fitted with double-hung 1/1 sliding timber sash windows with window horns and exposed sash boxes.

Northwest elevation: The building is attached at this side to No. 17 Charlemont Square East.

Northeast (rear) elevation: The rear elevation faces northeast and is enclosed within rock-faced random-coursed stone boundary walling around a concrete yard, accessed through a planked painted timber door from the rear access route. The inner face of the original stone boundary walling is smooth rendered. At the southwestern end of the elevation, at ground-floor level, there is a wider-than-standard side-opening casement window with a replacement concrete sill. A double-hung sliding timber sash window sits at first-floor level towards the centre of the elevation. From the northwest end of the façade, a single-storey rear return projects to the northeast as far as the yard boundary wall, with a flat felt-covered roof. On the southeast side of the rear return there is a painted timber door with two glazed upper panels, a top-opening timber casement window to its right, and a separate boiler house to the right of the window, accessed from the yard through a planked painted timber door. The rear elevation is generally smooth rendered with concrete sills, timber casement windows at ground-floor level, and original stone walling above on the rear return. Rainwater goods to the rear return are uPVC.

Southeast elevation: The building is attached at this side to No. 15 Charlemont Square East.

SETTING

No. 16 forms part of Charlemont Square East, one side of a formally planned square of 66 buildings in total — mill workers' dwellings and shops — arranged along the east, north and west sides of a central green, with principal access from Fountain Street to the southeast. Each house is set back from the perimeter road and pavement behind a modest front yard enclosed by dwarf walling topped with hooped metal railings. The east and west terraces are stepped in groups of two dwellings, following the gentle relief of the site. No. 16 is one of twenty-seven similar two-storey houses on the eastern terrace, which also includes five larger two-and-a-half-storey shop buildings at its southeastern end (with traditional shop fronts at ground-floor level and dwellings above). The northern terrace, being the shortest at only eight houses wide, consists of distinctly larger two-and-a-half-storey paired buildings. Rear yards are generally larger than the front yards and are enclosed by random-coursed rubble stone walling with square-headed door openings onto a wide rear access route; rear façades across the square are much altered, with various extensions of different shapes and sizes. The central area of the square is laid to lawn and enclosed by hooped galvanised metal railings with some established trees along its boundary. A children's playground to the southeast contains a monument to the installation of electric lighting in Bessbrook in 1911, and Bessbrook's War Memorial is centrally positioned to the southeast of the playground.