12 Charlemont Square East, Bessbrook, Co.Armagh

12 Charlemont Square East 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, County Armagh. The listing extends to the house itself, together with its gate, railings, and yard walling.

The building is constructed in an L-plan form facing southwest, with a single-storey rear return. Its walls are built in generally random-coursed, rock-faced local Newry Granodiorite — a high-quality granite quarried on the former Charlemont Estate — with painted red brick dressings, painted stone cills, and stepped red brick surrounds to gauged-brick cambered door and window openings, though the door and window heads have generally been squared off with painted smooth cement render. The pitched roof is finished in fibre cement with angled black clay ridge tiles, and the original slates have been replaced. A rectangular-section red brick chimney stack with two terracotta pots rises at the northwest end. The eaves are flush with a red brick corbel course beneath, and rainwater is carried by metal guttering with half-round guttering discharging to circular-section downpipes.

The front elevation faces southwest and is near-symmetrical, set flush with the main terrace line. A modest raised concrete front yard is enclosed by hooped metal railings with a painted metal foot gate to the southeast, from which a concrete path leads to a panelled painted timber door positioned to the southeast of the facade. The door has two glazed panels to its upper half and a square-headed fanlight above. The fenestration is regular: two windows at first-floor level are set in line with the ground-floor openings. The windows are generally one-over-one double-hung sliding timber sash windows with window horns and exposed sash boxes. The current sash window frames replaced the original glazing in 1999.

To the northwest, the building is attached to No. 13 Charlemont Square East, and to the southeast it is attached to No. 11 Charlemont Square East. Access to the rear elevation is limited, but where visible it consists of a single-storey flat-roof rear return at the northwest end projecting northeast to the boundary of an enclosed rear yard. A planked painted timber door in random-coursed rock-faced stone boundary walling gives access from the rear service route into the yard. The rear elevation retains its original random-coursed rock-faced walling with one timber sash window visible at first-floor level; the rear return has a smooth rendered finish. The yard boundary walling remains in near-original condition. Rainwater goods to the rear are uPVC.

Around 1980, the stone façade was repointed and new cast iron rainwater goods were installed as part of general restoration work. A single-storey flat-roof extension was added to the rear of the building at some point, and the original roof slates were replaced with fibre cement.

No. 12 forms part of Charlemont Square East, one side of a formally planned square of 66 buildings arranged on three sides around a central green, primarily accessed from Fountain Street to the southeast. The eastern terrace comprises twenty-seven two-storey two-bay terraced houses of similar character to No. 12, together with five larger two-and-a-half-storey shop buildings at the southeastern end, which have traditional shop fronts at ground-floor level with dwellings above. The western terrace similarly has one larger shop building at its southeastern end. The northern terrace is the shortest, comprising only eight houses, which are distinctly larger two-and-a-half-storey paired buildings. The terraces along the east and west sides are stepped in groups of two dwellings to respect the subtle relief of the site. Each house is set back from the perimeter public road and footpath behind a modest front yard typically enclosed by dwarf walling topped by hooped metal railings. To the rear, a generally larger yard is enclosed by random-coursed rubble stone walling with a square-headed door opening onto a wide rear access route, though rear facades are much altered with various extensions of different shapes and sizes. The front facades are nearly uniform along the east and west terraces. The central area of the square is now laid to lawn and enclosed by hooped galvanised metal railings with some 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.

The historical and social significance of this building and its terrace is considerable. Bessbrook was effectively founded in 1845 when John Grubb Richardson (1813–1891), a Quaker linen merchant from Lambeg, purchased one of the derelict mills at the site and began building housing for his factory workers nearby. The origins of industrial activity at Bessbrook are older still: in 1761, a Mr. John Pollock opened the first woollen mill and bleach green at a location then simply known as "The Green," which was subsequently renamed Bessbrook after Pollock's wife Elizabeth (Bess) and the nearby Camlough River (Brook). By the 1830s, as recorded on the first edition Ordnance Survey map, few buildings had been erected; the only significant structures were Mount Caulfield House and a number of thread manufactories and bleach mills.

Richardson, in his own words, had "a great aversion to be responsible for a factory population in a large town" and chose Bessbrook for its water power, local flax cultivation, and rural setting near Newry. He established the village as a social and philanthropic experiment, influenced in his planning by the work of William Penn, the American Quaker responsible for the layout of Philadelphia in the late 17th century. Richardson's layout of Bessbrook began with Fountain Street in the 1840s. As a member of the Religious Society of Friends, Richardson combined pragmatic and altruistic aims: by providing his workers with good living standards he hoped to foster good employer-employee relations and to encourage self-improvement among workers drawn from the surrounding countryside. Bessbrook became famously known as a village without the "Three P's" — no public house, no pawn shop, and therefore no need for a police presence — a stipulation that Richardson maintained by providing recreational and educational facilities at the Institute, well-stocked shops at Nos. 1–5 Charlemont Square East, and distributing milk, tea, and cocoa to mill workers. The majority of the population voted to preserve this ordinance in the 1870s, and to this day there remains no public house at Bessbrook. Police were not stationed in the village until the turn of the 20th century.

In 1863, Richardson became sole owner of the Bessbrook Spinning Company after buying out his brother's shares. The local linen industry experienced a boom during the American Civil War (1861–65) as access to American cotton was cut off, and Richardson greatly enlarged both his factory and his workforce. Lord Charlemont sold the remainder of the Camlough Estate to Richardson in 1865, making Richardson by the mid-1860s both the principal employer and principal landowner at Bessbrook. Between 1861 and 1871, the population of Bessbrook 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. The architect of the houses is not known with certainty; Brett suggests that John Hardy, a civil engineer appointed company architect in 1881, may have carried out some work in Bessbrook in 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 Newry Granodiorite used throughout the square was quarried locally on the former Charlemont Estate and is of high quality — the same stone was used to build Manchester Town Hall and the great steps of St. George's Hall in Liverpool.

Charlemont Square was not shown on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1861, but construction had commenced by 1862. Griffith's Valuation of that year noted that Charlemont Square West (then captioned "new row") was the only side of the square to have been completed, though all 26 buildings along it remained unoccupied. The remainder of the square, including No. 12 Charlemont Square East, was completed and occupied by at least 1866 according to the Annual Revisions. Each house in the square was owned by the Bessbrook Spinning Company and contained between three and five rooms. Tenants were required to sign an agreement stipulating, among other things, conditions regarding the keeping of fowl and pigs (confined to the garden or yard rather than the family quarters), and an obligation to send their children to school until old enough for mill work.

No. 12 Charlemont Square East was initially let by the Bessbrook Spinning Company to a Mr. John McCartney and was valued at £5 and 10 shillings. The occupants changed frequently over the following decades, though its valuation remained unaltered until the 1950s. The building was depicted in its current layout on the Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1906. The Census of Ireland records that in 1911 the house was occupied by John Ritchie, a stoker in Richardson's factory; the census building return described it as a second-class dwelling consisting of five rooms. Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57), the house was occupied by William Lockhart, who remained until 1961 when a Mr. Andrew Haughey took possession. The house was purchased outright by C. R. Morrow — a local car and farm machinery dealer who acquired the majority of the houses along the square in around 1970 — and was valued at £7 and 10 shillings under the Second General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1956–72). The sale of Bessbrook Spinning Company housing during the 1960s and 1970s was necessitated by the post-war downturn in the local textile market, which led to the closure of the mill in 1972. During the Second World War, the mill workers had been tasked with supplying cloth for military uniforms.

No. 12 Charlemont Square East 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. Bessbrook is internationally significant as an early planned mill village; its carefully planned development, including the uniform terraces of Charlemont Square and College Square, predates and is considered to have influenced the famous English model villages of Saltaire (1852), Port Sunlight (1888), and Bourneville (developed by the Cadbury family from 1895), which have in turn directly influenced town and country planning all over the world. At the time of the second survey, No. 12 continued in use as a private dwelling, retaining its original Victorian character.