Tower at former railway station, Railway Street, Newcastle, Co. Down, BT33 OAL

Tower at former railway station, Railway Street, Newcastle, County Down

This is an unusual, broad three-storey brick-built tower with turrets and spire, serving as the disproportionate centrepiece of a former railway station. Built in 1905 by the Belfast & County Down Railway, probably to designs by W.H. Morris, the Chief Assistant Engineer, the tower has a distinctly 'toytown'-like appearance and is out of proportion with the rest of the building.

The tower is relatively broad and is sandwiched between two single-storey wings to the east and west, also largely in red brick. At ground floor level on the south face there is a central semicircular arched recess with double timber-sheeted doors and a now boarded semicircular fanlight. To either side of the doorway arch is a minuscule decorative moulded brick springing course which continues around the east and west faces of the tower. There used to be arched window openings to each side of the doorway as well as doorways to the east and west faces, but these have all been skilfully blocked using similar brick as the façade, except for the doorway to the west face. The stone steps of the former doorway to the east are still visible. At second floor level there is a clock to each face of the tower, fringed with moulded brick in a roundel-like manner. The tower has a castellated parapet with corner turrets that are bartizan-like but with copper-covered spire roofs with finials. There is a projecting moulded brick course just below the castellations. The castellations themselves have granite coping and there is a course of granite beneath the spire roofs of the turrets. The tower is topped with an octagonal spire, copper-covered with a weather-vane finial.

The east and west wings flanking the tower are single-storey with gabled roofs. Each culminates in an outer gabled bay, with the bay on the east set at an angle. Both wings have large returns to the north. The front façades of both wings have been greatly altered in recent times, with that to the east now rendered and with large picture windows, and that to the west with a large flat arched doorway inserted with an original arch-headed window obliterated in the process. Two original windows survive to the right of the large doorway, but a third window has been blocked up and is now merely a recess. Both façades also have modern shop and public house signage attached. However, the gables of the outer bays have retained their original semicircular arch-headed windows (two to each bay) and shaped bargeboards with finials. The east and west wings have retained natural slate and clay ridge tiles to their gabled roofs as well as their original brick chimney stacks. The returns to the north also appear to have retained their original openings. The rear portion of the station between the returns has been greatly extended recently with the addition of a large single-storey section with a shallow gabled corrugated iron roof. The hipped roof of the original rear portion is also covered in corrugated iron.

Historically there was a large cast iron porte-cochère with a glazed hipped roof to the front of this former railway station, which may have been removed when the station closed in 1950. The area around the former station is now covered in tarmac and serves as a car park.

The station replaced an earlier station built slightly to the north by the Downpatrick, Dundrum & Newcastle Railway when the line to Newcastle was completed in 1869. The line closed in 1950. Since that time the building has served firstly as a bus station and then, from around 1979, as a shopping centre, with the east wing converted to a public house some time prior to the mid-1970s.