4 Charlemont Square East, Bessbrook, Co.Armagh

4 Charlemont Square East, Bessbrook, County Armagh

This is a two-and-a-half-storey, two-bay mid-Victorian terraced shop with dwelling above, built between 1862 and 1866 to the designs of an unknown architect. It forms part of the eastern terrace of Charlemont Square, one of the most historically significant planned settlements in Ireland and internationally recognised as an early model mill village.

Origins and Historical Context

Bessbrook's origins lie in 1761, when a Mr. John Pollock opened the first woollen mill and bleach green at a 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, when the first Ordnance Survey maps were made, relatively little had been built at Bessbrook; the most significant structures recorded were 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 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 his reasoning in his own words: he 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." Development began with the laying out of Fountain Street in the 1840s.

Richardson was a member of the Religious Society of Friends, and his layout of the village was influenced by the work of William Penn, the American Quaker responsible for the planning and development of Philadelphia in the late 17th century. Richardson's approach combined practical and philanthropic aims: by providing his workers with good living conditions, he hoped to foster positive relations between employer and employed and encourage self-improvement. He is known to have brought the poor, the unqualified and beggars from the surrounding countryside to work and live at Bessbrook. The village became famous as a settlement without the "Three P's" — no Public House, no Pawn Shop, and therefore no need for Police. In place of a public house, Richardson provided recreational and educational facilities at the Institute, a number of well-stocked shops (located at numbers 1 to 5 Charlemont Square East), and arranged for milk, tea and cocoa to be distributed to his mill workers. The majority of residents voted to preserve this arrangement in the 1870s, and to this day there remains no public house 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 significant boom during the American Civil War (1861–65), when the blockade of Southern ports cut off access to American cotton, driving demand for linen. Richardson expanded both his factory and his workforce to take advantage of this. In 1865 Lord Charlemont sold the remainder of the Camlough Estate to Richardson, making Richardson both the principal employer and the principal landowner at Bessbrook. Charlemont Square was laid out between 1862 and 1866 to accommodate the influx of new workers; between 1861 and 1871 the population of Bessbrook rose from 637 to 2,215, and the number of houses increased from 73 to 296.

Charlemont Square was not yet shown on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1861, but construction had begun by 1862. Griffith's Valuation of that year noted that Charlemont Square West, described as "new row," was the only completed side, though all 26 of its buildings remained unoccupied. The remaining buildings around the square, including those on the eastern terrace, were completed and occupied by at least 1866 according to the Annual Revisions. The architect of the houses is not known with certainty; Charles Brett suggested 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 expanding the mill buildings. The terraces were built by masons and joiners employed directly by the Bessbrook Spinning Company.

The stone used throughout Charlemont Square is Newry Granodiorite, quarried locally on the former Charlemont Estate. This granite is of high quality and was also used in the construction of Manchester Town Hall and the great steps of St. George's Hall in Liverpool.

Each house at Bessbrook was owned by the Bessbrook Spinning Company and contained between three and five rooms. Tenants were required to sign a lease containing specific conditions: they were obliged to keep fowl and pigs out of the family quarters and the yard (a pig-sty and fowl-run were permitted in the garden), and to send their children to school until they were old enough to work in the mill.

Brett described Charlemont Square as the centrepiece of the new developments at Bessbrook. The Bessbrook Conservation Area Guide notes that the planned development of Bessbrook — including the uniform terraces at Charlemont Square and College Square — influenced the design of the famous English model villages at Saltaire (1852), Port Sunlight (1888) and Bourneville, developed by the Cadbury family in 1895, which have "directly influenced town and country planning all over the world."

History of No. 4 Specifically

Number 4 Charlemont Square East was first let by the Bessbrook Spinning Company to a Mr. James Henderson and was valued at £12. The building has had a ground floor shopfront since its construction, as shown on the Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1906. The 1911 Census of Ireland recorded the occupant as Daniel O'Hare, a local grocer, flesher and merchant who ran a victualler's shop at the premises; the building return described it as a second-class dwelling consisting of ten rooms. The O'Hare family remained at the property until around 1920, when a Mr. Edward Collins, a local butcher, took possession. The First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57) raised the rateable value of the house to £15.

During the 20th century the Bessbrook Spinning Company continued to expand and gained international recognition; during the Second World War its workers were tasked with supplying cloth for military uniforms. The company retained ownership of housing in Bessbrook until the 1960s, when the dwellings along Charlemont Square began to be sold to private individuals and firms. The majority of houses along the square were purchased by C. R. Morrow, a local car and farm machinery dealer, around 1970. These sales were necessitated by the post-war decline in the local textile market, which led to the closure of the mill in 1972, after which the mill building was occupied by the British Army. The Collins family continued to live at No. 4 until at least the 1970s and purchased the property outright in 1968; by the end of the Second General Revaluation (1956–72) the total rateable value stood at £26.

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. Around 1984 a single-storey flat-roofed rear extension was added, and in the same year the building underwent extensive renovation including repointing of stonework, installation of cast iron rainwater goods, and replacement of the original windows and entrance doors. The building continues to be used as a victualler's shop and private dwelling.

Architectural Description

The building has a rectangular plan facing southwest, with a single-storey rear return added around 1984, a single-storey attached cold store, and a covered yard to the rear.

The external walls are of generally random-coursed, rock-faced local Newry Granodiorite with red brick dressings. Window openings have painted stone cills and stepped red brick surrounds to the shopfront, the door opening, and gauged-brick cambered arches over the window openings. The roof is pitched and covered with fibre cement slates with black roll-top ridge tiles. There is a half-dormer window to the southwest elevation and a replacement rectangular-section red brick chimney to the northwest with two terracotta pots and a single buff clay pot. The eaves project and are finished with a painted timber fascia and soffit. Rainwater goods are generally cast iron with half-round guttering discharging to circular-section downpipes, except to the rear elevation and return where uPVC has been used.

Principal (Southwest) Elevation

The front elevation abuts the public footpath. At the southeast end of the elevation, at ground floor level, there is a panelled painted timber door opening onto a single stone step, giving access to the entrance hall of the private dwelling. This door has brass furniture and a semi-circular arched fanlight with plain glazing above it. To the left (northwest) of this door, also at ground floor level, is the painted timber shopfront with its own entrance door; this door has glazed upper and lower halves and a semi-circular arched fanlight above. A narrowly projecting moulded timber signboard sits above the shopfront, with a large glazed panel below it set on dwarf walling and defined by fluted painted timber pilasters. The facade has a near-regular fenestration pattern, with two windows at first floor level and a half-dormer window at attic level with a plain replacement painted timber bargeboard. The windows are generally replacement top-opening timber casement windows with a window horn detail to the front southwest elevation, this detail being absent from the rear windows.

Northwest Elevation

The building is attached on the northwest to No. 5 Charlemont Square East.

Southeast Elevation

The building is attached on the southeast to No. 3 Charlemont Square East.

Rear (Northeast) Elevation

The rear elevation has two top-opening timber casement windows at first floor level and two skylights to the pitched roof. At the southeast end a single-storey flat-roofed rear return projects into the rear yard, with a similarly sized cold store projecting from the northwest end of the elevation. Between these projections is a narrow yard extension oriented northeast to southwest, now covered with a monopitched corrugated Perspex roof. The boundary walling to the northeast extent of the yard is replacement smooth-rendered masonry with two planked painted timber doors — one leading to the narrow concrete yard extension and one to the rear return at the southeast end. The ground floor level and the rear extensions are generally smooth cement rendered, while the original stonework is exposed above.

Setting

No. 4 forms part of Charlemont Square East, which is itself part of a formally planned arrangement of 66 mill workers' dwellings and shops comprising a square made up of east, north and west terraces arranged around a central green. Each house is set back from the perimeter public road and footpath, with a modest front yard typically enclosed by dwarf walling topped with hooped metal railings. The terraces to the east and west are stepped in groups of two dwellings, responding to the subtle relief of the site. Each dwelling generally has a larger rear yard enclosed by random-coursed rubble stone walling with a square-headed door opening onto a wide rear access route. Rear facades are much altered with extensions of various shapes and sizes.

The front facades are nearly uniform along the east and west terraces. The five larger buildings at the southeast end of Charlemont Square East — of which this building forms a part — and one at the southeast end of Charlemont Square West generally retain traditional shopfronts at ground floor level with dwellings above. The northern terrace is the shortest at only eight houses wide; these are distinctly larger two-and-a-half-storey paired buildings.

The central area of the square is laid to lawn and enclosed by hooped galvanised metal railings with established trees at its boundary. A children's playground is located to the southeast and includes a monument to the installation of electric lighting in 1911. Bessbrook's War Memorial is centrally located to the southeast of the playground.