2 Charlemont Square North, Bessbrook, Co.Armagh

2 Charlemont Square North is a two-and-a-half-storey, two-bay mid-Victorian terraced house, built between approximately 1862 and 1866 to designs by an unknown architect. It forms part of the northern terrace of Charlemont Square in Bessbrook, County Armagh, and is listed along with its gate, railings, and yard walling. The building sits within the Bessbrook Conservation Area, designated in 1983.

Historical and Social Context

Bessbrook's origins as an industrial settlement date to 1761, when a woollen mill and bleach green were opened at a site then known simply as "The Green." The site was renamed Bessbrook in honour of Elizabeth (Bess) Pollock, wife of mill owner John Pollock, and the nearby Camlough River. The first edition Ordnance Survey map of the 1830s recorded very few buildings at Bessbrook at that time, with Mount Caulfield House and several thread manufactories and bleach mills among the only notable structures.

The village as it stands 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 a derelict mill on the site and began constructing housing for his factory workers. Richardson later wrote that he had "a great aversion to be responsible for a factory population in a large town," and so chose a rural location near Newry with water power, a local flax supply, and a sizeable rural population nearby. His layout of the village was influenced by the work of William Penn, the American Quaker responsible for the planning of Philadelphia in the late 17th century.

Richardson developed Bessbrook as a social experiment and model village, guided by a philanthropic ethos typical of Quaker industrialists: providing good living conditions and steady employment for his workers, including the rural poor from the surrounding countryside, in the belief that a decent environment would foster self-improvement and positive employer–employee relations. The village became famous as a settlement without the "Three P's" — no public house, no pawn shop, and therefore, Richardson argued, no need for police. In lieu of a pub, he provided recreational and educational facilities at the Institute, distributed milk, tea and cocoa to mill workers, and supplied well-stocked shops at nos. 1–5 Charlemont Square East. The majority of the population voted to preserve these conditions 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 share. 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, greatly increasing demand for linen. Richardson expanded his factory and workforce accordingly. By 1865, following Lord Charlemont's sale of the remainder of the Camlough Estate to Richardson, he was both the principal employer and principal landowner at Bessbrook. Between 1861 and 1871 the village's population 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 of workers, and formed the centrepiece of the new developments. The architect of the houses is not known with certainty. Charles Brett has suggested that John Hardy, a civil engineer appointed as company architect in 1881, may have carried out some work at Bessbrook in the 1860s, though his role may have been limited to expansions of the mill buildings. The terraces were built by masons and joiners employed directly by the Bessbrook Spinning Company. The stone used throughout is Newry Granodiorite, quarried locally on the former Charlemont Estate — a high-quality granite also used in the construction of Manchester Town Hall and the main steps of St George's Hall in Liverpool.

Charlemont Square does not appear on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1861, but by 1862 Griffith's Valuation recorded Charlemont Square West — captioned "new row" — as the only completed side, though all 26 of its buildings were then unoccupied. The remaining terraces, including the northern terrace of which this house forms part, were completed and occupied by at least 1866, as confirmed by 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, that pigs and fowl be kept in a pig-sty or fowl-run in the garden and not in the family quarters or yard, and that children be sent to school until old enough for mill work.

The Bessbrook Conservation Area Guide notes that the planned development of Bessbrook — including the uniform terraces at Charlemont Square and College Square — influenced the design of the celebrated English model villages at Saltaire (1852), Port Sunlight (1888), and Bournville (developed by the Cadbury family from 1895), which have in turn "directly influenced town and country planning all over the world." Bessbrook is therefore of international significance as an early planned mill village.

During the 20th century the Bessbrook Spinning Company continued to expand and gained international recognition. During the Second World War, mill workers produced cloth for military uniforms. The company retained ownership of the Charlemont Square houses until the 1960s, when the post-war decline in the textile market began to make ownership of the housing stock difficult to sustain. The majority of the houses along the square were purchased by C. R. Morrow, a local car and farm machinery dealer, in around 1970. The mill itself closed in 1972 and was subsequently occupied by the British Army.

History of No. 2 Charlemont Square North

No. 2 Charlemont Square North was initially let by the Bessbrook Spinning Company to a Ms. Sarah Collins and valued at £8. The occupants changed with some frequency over the following decades, though the property's valuation remained unaltered until the 1930s. The Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1906 depicts the house in its current form, including the entrance porch and rear return. A tennis ground was shown within the central green on the same map.

The Census of Ireland records that in 1911 the house was occupied by William John Downey, employed as a mechanic by the Bessbrook Spinning Company. The census building return described it as a second-class dwelling of eight rooms. The First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57) raised its value to £9 and 10 shillings, and the Downey family continued to reside there until 1969. In that year No. 2 was purchased outright by a Mr. Frank Anderson and was valued at £14 and 10 shillings under the Second General Revaluation (1956–72).

The building was listed in 1981. In 1984 it underwent an extensive renovation, which included reconstruction of the red-brick chimney stack, repointing of the stone façade, the addition of cast iron rainwater goods, and the installation of new windows. At the time of the second survey the house continued to be used as a private dwelling.

Architecture

No. 2 is an L-plan building facing southeast, with a gabled projecting side entry porch to the front elevation and a two-storey rear return. It retains its external Victorian character despite the replacement of the original windows and roof slates.

The walls are of generally random-coursed, rock-faced local Newry Granodiorite with painted red-brick dressings and painted stone cills. Window openings have gauged-brick cambered heads. The roof is pitched fibre cement with roll-top black clay ridge tiles. The rectangular-section red-brick chimney to the southwest was rebuilt in around 1984 and has six terracotta clay pots. Eaves project with a painted timber soffit; rainwater is carried by uPVC half-round guttering discharging to a cast-iron circular-section downpipe at the front southeast elevation, with similar cast-iron rainwater goods to the rear northwest elevation.

Principal (Southeast) Elevation

The front elevation is near-symmetrical and flush with the main terrace. A good-sized gravelled front yard is enclosed by a red-brick dwarf wall topped by plain hooped painted metal railings, with a matching foot gate hung on circular-section painted metal posts with cast-metal conical caps, positioned centrally. A concrete path leads northwest from the gate to a panelled and glazed uPVC door on the southwest side of the single-storey gabled projecting side entry porch. The door has two glazed rectangular panels to the upper half and a half-round glazed section at the top, all in frosted glass. The porch is situated at the northeast end of the façade, has a painted smooth render finish, and abuts a similar porch structure belonging to No. 1 Charlemont Square North to the northeast. The southeast gable of the porch features a painted timber wave-scroll bargeboard with finial and a single top-opening uPVC casement window. The main façade has a near-regular fenestration pattern: two windows at first-floor level aligned with a reduced-size window in the entrance porch, and an increased-width window to the left-hand side at ground-floor level. Windows are generally four-pane uPVC top-opening casements to the front southeast elevation, and plain uPVC top-opening casements to the rear northwest elevation.

Southwest Elevation

The building is attached on its southwest side to No. 3 Charlemont Square North.

Northwest (Rear) Elevation

Access to the northwest elevation is limited. Where visible, it consists of a single-bay, two-storey monopitched-roof rear return at the northeast, projecting into the rear yard and abutted by a smaller single-storey monopitched boiler house with a corrugated metal roof to its northwest. A painted timber door set within rough cement-rendered boundary walling leads from the rear access route into the yard. The rear return has flush eaves and a uPVC casement window visible at first-floor level. Single uPVC casement windows face northwest at both first- and ground-floor levels on the main rear façade. The rear elevation generally has a painted smooth cement-rendered finish with uPVC top-opening casement windows and painted cills; two skylights are also visible in the pitched fibre cement tile roof.

Northeast Elevation

The building is attached on its northeast side to No. 1 Charlemont Square North.

Group Character and Setting

No. 2 is one of eight similar houses (arranged in pairs) forming the northern terrace of Charlemont Square — the shortest of the square's three terraces, being only eight houses wide, though these are distinctly larger two-and-a-half-storey structures. Each pair of dwellings is characterised by abutting gabled side entry porches flanking large rectangular-section chimneys, with painted stepped red-brick quoins. The broader square comprises 66 buildings in total arranged along north, west, and east terraces around a central green, primarily accessed from Fountain Street to the southeast. The east and west terraces are stepped in groups of two dwellings to respect the subtle topography of the site. Five of the larger buildings to the southeast of Charlemont Square East and one to the southeast of Charlemont Square West have traditional shopfronts at ground-floor level with dwellings above. Each house is set back from the perimeter road and footpath with a modest front yard enclosed by dwarf walling and hooped metal railings. Rear yards are generally larger, enclosed by random-coursed rubble stone walling with square-headed doorways opening onto a wide rear access route; the rear elevations have been considerably altered with various extensions of differing shapes and sizes.

The central green is now laid to lawn and enclosed by hooped galvanised metal railings with established trees along its boundary. A children's playground is located to the southeast, and includes a monument to the installation of electric lighting in Bessbrook in 1911; Bessbrook's War Memorial is centrally positioned to the southeast of the playground.