7 Kildare Street, Newry, Co Down, BT34 1DQ

7 Kildare Street, Newry

A three-storey shop with attic, constructed in ashlar granite, occupying a prominent corner site at Kildare Street and Abbey Way. Originally built to high standards with skilful external detailing reflecting local building traditions, though loss of historic fabric has since compromised its quality.

The building features a pyramidal roof of natural slate with a skylight to each front pitch and three chimneys. Two side chimneys are rectangular in ashlar granite with stringcourses and swept granite copings. The corner chimney consists of a pair of square stacks detailed similarly. The gutter is inset to the eaves cornice.

Both facades are identical in treatment. The walls are ashlar granite with a corbelled eaves course. The ground floor displays V-channelled, banded rustication on a rendered base course, with smooth ashlar above. A projecting platband separates the first and second floors. The walls curve around the corner in a quarter circle.

The ground floor corner doorway consists of a pair of five-panelled timber doors set between two V-channelled piers with a depressed moulded granite head. Two ground floor windows on each elevation have modern tongue and groove sheeted heads concealing shutter boxes, detailed as the doorway, set on rendered stall risers. A moulded stringcourse and cornice with painted fascia runs between ground and first floors, acting as a cill course for first floor windows.

The first floor on both elevations features two round-headed timber windows each, with 2/2 sliding sash horizontal divisions set within semicircular-headed openings with plain architraves. The second floor has two 1/1 sliding sash windows in line with those below, with single granite lintels and cills.

The right gable to Kildare Street, rising above the adjoining building, is detailed in ashlar granite matching the front wall. The left gable to Abbey Way rises above an adjoining building forming part of the same property. This elevation has an ashlar cornice, but below the bracketed eaves the material changes: only the first four sections are ashlar, with the remainder in rubble granite and brick.

A building is recorded at this location on the 1835 Ordnance Survey map and was described as a house valued at £26 in 1838. The 1863 valuation recorded it as three and a half storeys high. Valuation remained relatively stable thereafter, suggesting no major reconstruction occurred after 1863. Documentary evidence does not clarify whether the building was constructed or rebuilt between 1835 and 1863, though its constructional style suggests a date of around 1860. It had become licensed premises by the turn of the twentieth century.