3 Bridge St., Rostrevor, Co.Down

3 Bridge Street, Rostrevor, County Down

This property is a late 18th-century or very early 19th-century shop and house, now Grade B2 listed. It lies within Rostrevor's conservation area.

The building is first documented on the Ordnance Survey map of 1834. The 1835 valuation book records it as a 'not new' shop and house in good condition, comprising a main unit measuring 14½ feet by 23 feet by 17½ feet high, with a return of 11½ feet by 10 feet by 6 feet, and an office of 16½ feet by 21½ feet by 16 feet high with a return of 11 feet by 8 feet by 6 feet. The structure consists of two storeys.

By 1861, the property had been reduced in recorded dimensions to 5 yards 2 feet by 6 feet by 2 storeys, with a return of 5 feet by 4 feet by 2 storeys and an office of 5 feet by 7 feet by 2 storeys, and was operating as a small grocery shop. The occupancy history is well documented: Ruth McAllister held the property from 1835 to at least 1838. Sarah White was the tenant in 1861, with John Cull as the immediate lessor. Cull himself became tenant in 1873 and by 1877 and 1880 was listed as a spirit dealer who also operated a coal yard and worked as a timber and iron merchant and grocer. His successors included Robert William Booth (1891), Mary Anne Marshall (1894), Samuel Moffett (1897), and James Irwin, listed as grocer, in 1898. The property remained vacant from 1907 to 1914, when Thomas McGuffin took up residence. Charlotte [?Moledin] occupied it in 1915 and Minnie Fearon in 1917, by which time the shop appears to have been converted to tea rooms. Subsequent occupants included Joseph Robinson (1925), Robert Gwynne (1936), Jim Trainor (1946), Mary Smyth (1948), and Thomas McPoland from 1955 until at least 1972. The property was amalgamated with numbers 5–7 Bridge Street sometime after 1979.

Bridge Street itself originated as part of the road from Kilkeel to Rathfriland and Newry. Oliver Sloane's County Down map of 1739 shows Rostrevor's settlement comprised solely of buildings along the northeastern side of this road, suggesting that this side of Bridge Street may represent the village's earliest development. An estate map of 1767 and Williamson's 1810 county map show development on both sides of the street, with expansion reaching its present extent by the 1834 first edition Ordnance Survey map. The street was known as 'Post Office Street' in the 1830s due to the presence of that establishment; by 1861 this had been modified to 'Old Post Office Street', and finally to 'Bridge Street' around 1894. The 1836 Ordnance Survey Memoirs describe it as 'leading from the centre of the main street in a south easterly direction to the bridge of Rostrevor…155 yards long, 95 feet broad at its broadest or north and western end and 25 feet at its narrowest part next [to] the bridge. The houses are of 2-storeys, in good order, all used for shops and having furnished lodgings for the accommodation of strangers.'