14 Charlemont Square East, Bessbrook, Co.Armagh

14 Charlemont Square East, Bessbrook, County Armagh

This is a modest two-storey, two-bay mid-Victorian terraced house, built between 1862 and 1866 as part of the planned mill village of Bessbrook. The listing covers the house together with its gate, railings and yard walling.

Historical and Social Context

Bessbrook itself has origins stretching back to 1761, when a John Pollock opened the first woollen mill and bleach green on a site then simply known as "The Green." The settlement was renamed Bessbrook after Pollock's wife Elizabeth (Bess) and the nearby Camlough River. By the 1830s, when the first Ordnance Survey maps were made, the area remained largely undeveloped, 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 linen merchant from Lambeg and a member of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), purchased one of the derelict mills on the site. Richardson later wrote that he had "a great aversion to be responsible for a factory population in a large town," and deliberately chose a rural location with water power, a local flax supply, and a surrounding country population. Development began with the laying out of Fountain Street in the 1840s.

Richardson modelled his approach to village planning partly on the work of William Penn, the American Quaker responsible for planning Philadelphia in the late 17th century. His motivation combined practical business thinking with genuine philanthropic intent: by providing workers with good living standards, he hoped to foster harmonious relations between employer and employed, and to encourage those who had come from poverty to improve their circumstances. The village became well known as one without the "Three P's" — no Public House, no Pawn Shop, and therefore no need for Police. Richardson provided recreational and educational facilities at the Institute, well-stocked shops (located at numbers 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 this arrangement in the 1870s, and to this day there is 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 and greatly increased demand for linen. Richardson expanded his factory and workforce considerably during this period. In 1865 Lord Charlemont sold the remainder of the Camlough Estate to Richardson, making Richardson both the principal employer and the dominant landowner in Bessbrook. Between 1861 and 1871 the village population grew from 637 to 2,215, and the number of houses rose from 73 to 296.

Charlemont Square was laid out between 1862 and 1866 to house this influx of workers. It forms what Charles Brett described as the centrepiece of the new developments at Bessbrook. The architect of the buildings 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 work at Bessbrook during 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 houses at Bessbrook were built using Newry Granodiorite, a local granite quarried on the former Charlemont Estate. This stone was used throughout the village and is of notably high quality — the same material was used to build Manchester Town Hall and the great steps of St George's Hall in Liverpool. Each house was owned by the Bessbrook Spinning Company and contained between three and five rooms. Tenants were required to sign an agreement stipulating conditions of occupation: fowl and pigs were not to be kept in the family quarters or yard, though a pigsty and fowl-run were permitted in the garden. Another clause obliged tenants to send their children to school until they were old enough for mill work. Each house came with a garden or yard of approximately one eighth of an acre.

Charlemont Square does not appear on the second Ordnance Survey map of 1861, but Griffith's Valuation of 1862 records that Charlemont Square West — described as "new row" — had been completed by that date, though all 26 houses along it remained unoccupied. The remaining terraces, including the eastern terrace of which number 14 forms part, were completed and occupied by at least 1866 according to the Annual Revisions.

No. 14 Charlemont Square East was initially let by the Bessbrook Spinning Company to a Mr John Hobson, with the house valued at £5 and 10 shillings. Occupants changed frequently over the following decades, though the valuation remained unchanged until the 1950s. In 1911 the Census of Ireland recorded the house as occupied by William Mathers, a local plumber and gas fitter whose family also worked at Richardson's factory. The census building return classified it as a second-class dwelling consisting of five rooms. Mathers remained at the address until 1949, when the house passed to the McCune family, who stayed until at least the 1970s.

During the 20th century the Bessbrook Spinning Company continued to expand and gained international recognition. During the Second World War its workers supplied cloth for military uniforms. The company began selling off its housing stock in the 1960s; the majority of houses along Charlemont Square were purchased by C. R. Morrow, a local car and farm machinery dealer, around 1970. The sale of property was driven by the post-war decline in the textile market, which ultimately led to the closure of the mill in 1972, after which the building was occupied by the British Army. No. 14 Charlemont Square East was purchased outright by Sarah McCune in 1968 and was valued at £7 and 10 shillings under the Second General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1956–72).

The house was listed in 1981 and included in the Bessbrook Conservation Area, designated in 1983 in recognition of the village's historical significance as a planned mill village and its distinct form and character. The Conservation Area Guide notes that the carefully 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 in turn "directly influenced town and country planning all over the world." Bessbrook is therefore internationally significant as one of the earliest planned mill villages, predating both Port Sunlight and Bourneville by several decades.

Architectural Description

No. 14 is one of 27 similar two-storey houses which, together with five larger two-and-a-half-storey shop buildings at the south-eastern end of the terrace, form the eastern side of Charlemont Square. The square as a whole comprises 66 buildings in total, arranged along three sides — east, north and west — around a central green, with primary access from Fountain Street to the south-east. The building is of L-plan form, facing south-west, with a single-bay two-storey rear return.

Walls are generally of random-coursed, rock-faced local Newry Granodiorite with red brick dressings. Window cills are of painted stone, and the door and window openings have stepped red brick surrounds to gauged-brick cambered heads — though the doorway and window heads have generally been squared off, with bands of smooth cement render applied to the surrounds. The roof is pitched and finished in fibre cement with angled black clay ridge tiles. There is a rectangular-section red brick chimney to the north-west with two pots: one buff clay and one terracotta. The eaves are flush with a red brick corbel course below. Rainwater goods are metal half-round guttering discharging to circular-section downpipes.

The principal (south-west facing) elevation is near-symmetrical and sits flush with the main terrace line, which is set slightly back from the larger shop buildings at the south-eastern end. A modest paved front yard is enclosed by hooped metal railings with a painted metal foot gate to the south-east. A paved path from the gate leads to a modern varnished planked timber door positioned to the south-east of the facade, which has one rectangular leaded glass panel to the top centre and a square-headed fanlight above. The facade has a regular fenestration pattern, with two windows at first-floor level aligned with the ground-floor openings below; all are double-hung 1/1 sliding timber sash windows with window horns and exposed sash boxes.

To the north-west the building is attached to No. 15 Charlemont Square East, and to the south-east it is attached to No. 13 Charlemont Square East.

At the rear, where access is limited, the north-east elevation shows a two-storey pitched-roof rear return at the south-eastern end, projecting north-east to the site boundary. The narrow rear yard — a single reduced bay in width — is reached through a planked painted timber door from the rear access route. The rear elevation has a smooth rendered finish, concrete cills, and top-opening timber casement windows at first-floor level. The rear return has uPVC soffit, fascia and bargeboard with uPVC box guttering discharging to square-section uPVC downpipes. The gable end of the return has uPVC windows with narrow concrete cills.

Alterations and Additions

Records held by the Northern Ireland Environment Agency note that the current sliding sash window frames were installed in 2000. The two-storey rear return was added around 2006. The original roof slates have been replaced with fibre cement, and the front door is not original. These alterations detract somewhat from the building's original character, though the principal facade retains its essential Victorian form.

Setting

No. 14 forms part of a formally planned arrangement of 66 mill workers' dwellings and shops making up Charlemont Square. Each house is set back from the perimeter road and footpath behind a modest front yard enclosed by dwarf walling topped by hooped metal railings. The terraces along the east and west sides are stepped in groups of two dwellings to follow the subtle contours of the site. To the rear, each dwelling has a larger yard 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 different shapes and sizes. Front facades along the east and west terraces are nearly uniform. The five larger buildings at the south-eastern end of Charlemont Square East and one at the south-eastern end of Charlemont Square West have traditional shopfronts at ground-floor level with dwellings above. The northern terrace is the shortest, comprising only eight houses, though 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 some established trees along its boundary. A children's playground is located to the south-east and includes a monument commemorating the installation of electric lighting in Bessbrook in 1911. The village's War Memorial is centrally located to the south-east of the playground.