7 Charlemont Square North, Bessbrook, Co.Armagh

7 Charlemont Square North, Bessbrook, County Armagh

A two-and-a-half-storey, two-bay mid-Victorian terraced house built between approximately 1862 and 1866, designed by an unknown architect. The house forms part of a formally planned mill workers' square of considerable local, national, and international significance.

Architectural Description

The house is of L-plan form, facing southeast, with a gabled projecting side entry porch to the front elevation and a two-storey rear return. The building was originally constructed in Newry Granodiorite with brick surrounds, but the stone facade has since been replaced and the exterior is now finished in dry-dash (cement pebbledash) render with smooth painted render dressings and painted stone cills. Square-headed door and window openings. The pitched roof is covered in fibre cement tiles with angled black clay ridge tiles. A box dormer window to the northeast, clad in uPVC, was reconstructed around 1991. A rectangular-section red brick chimney to the northeast has six buff clay pots. Projecting eaves have a painted timber soffit and fascia. Rainwater goods are uPVC with half-round guttering discharging to circular-section downpipes.

The front elevation is near-symmetrical. Two windows at first-floor level align with the reduced-size southeast window of the entrance porch and a wider window to the right-hand side at ground-floor level. Windows are generally four-pane uPVC top-opening casements to the front and plain uPVC top-opening casements to the rear.

The single-storey gabled projecting side entry porch is positioned at the southwest end of the facade and abuts a similar porch belonging to No. 8 Charlemont Square North to the southwest. The porch has a painted smooth render finish, a painted timber wave-scroll bargeboard with finial, and a single top-opening uPVC casement window to the southeast gable. A panelled and glazed uPVC door faces northwest within the porch.

To the front, a good-sized yard is laid to lawn and enclosed by smooth rendered dwarf walling topped by plain hooped painted metal railings. A foot gate hung on circular-section painted metal posts with cast metal conical caps is centred on the southeast boundary. A concrete path leads from the gate to the porch door.

The southwest elevation is attached to No. 8 Charlemont Square North. The northeast elevation is attached to No. 6 Charlemont Square North. The northwest (rear) elevation has limited accessibility, but where visible it comprises a single-bay, two-storey monopitched rear return at the northeast projecting into the rear yard, abutted by a smaller single-storey monopitched boiler house to the northwest. The rear return has flush eaves, a uPVC casement window at first-floor level facing northeast, and a similar window facing northwest at first-floor level on the main facade. A varnished timber door set within painted smooth cement rendered boundary walling leads from the rear access route into the yard. Two skylights are visible in the pitched fibre cement roof of the rear return. The rear elevation generally has a painted smooth cement rendered finish and uPVC casement windows with painted stone cills.

The listing extent covers the house, gate, railings, and yard walling.

Group and Setting

No. 7 is one of eight similar houses (arranged in pairs) forming the northern terrace of Charlemont Square. The square as a whole consists of 66 buildings in total arranged on three sides — north, east, and west — around a central green, primarily accessed from Fountain Street to the southeast. The northern terrace is the shortest of the three, being only eight houses wide, though its houses are distinctly larger two-and-a-half-storey structures. Each pair of dwellings is united by abutting gabled side entry porches, flanking large rectangular-section chimneys, and painted stepped red brick quoins.

The central green is now laid to lawn and enclosed by hooped galvanised metal railings with some established trees at its boundary. A children's playground to the southeast 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 east and west terraces are stepped in groups of two dwellings to respect the subtle relief of the site. Five 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. Front facades along the east and west terraces are nearly uniform. Rear facades are much altered with various extensions of differing shapes and sizes. Each house is set back from the perimeter public road and footpath with a modest front yard typically enclosed by dwarf walling topped by hooped metal railings, and generally has a larger rear yard enclosed by random coursed rubble stone walling with a square-headed door opening onto a wide rear access route.

Historical and Social Significance

Charlemont Square was laid out between 1862 and 1866 as part of the broader planned development of Bessbrook village, itself founded in 1845 when John Grubb Richardson (1813–1891), a linen merchant from Lambeg and a member of the Religious Society of Friends, purchased a derelict mill near Newry and began building housing for his factory workers. Richardson later recalled that he had "a great aversion to be responsible for a factory population in a large town" and therefore chose a rural site with water power, a surrounding agricultural population, and locally cultivated flax.

The origins of industry at the site date to 1761, when the first woollen mill and bleach green were opened by a Mr John Pollock. The area was then known simply as "The Green" but was renamed Bessbrook after Pollock's wife Elizabeth (known as "Bess") and the nearby Camlough River ("Brook"). The first edition Ordnance Survey map of the 1830s records very few buildings at Bessbrook at that time, with only Mount Caulfield House (the residence of the Nicholson family) and a number of thread manufactories and bleach mills depicted. Village development began in earnest in the 1840s with the laying out of Fountain Street.

Richardson's 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's philanthropic intentions led him to employ and house the poor and unqualified from the surrounding countryside, hoping to improve their circumstances and encourage them to give up old habits. Bessbrook became famously known as the village without the "Three P's": there was to be no Public House, no Pawn Shop, and therefore no need for Police. In exchange, Richardson provided recreational and educational facilities at the Institute, a number of well-stocked shops along Charlemont Square East, and had milk, tea and cocoa distributed to his mill workers. The majority of the population voted to preserve these conditions 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 the sole owner of the Bessbrook Spinning Company following the purchase of his brother's shares. The local linen industry experienced a significant boom during the American Civil War (1861–65), when access to American cotton was cut off, and Richardson greatly enlarged his factory and workforce to capitalise on this. Lord Charlemont sold the remainder of the Camlough Estate to Richardson in 1865, making Richardson the principal landowner as well as the main employer at Bessbrook. Charlemont Square was laid out between 1862 and 1866 to accommodate the resulting influx of workers: between 1861 and 1871 the population of Bessbrook rose from 637 to 2,215 and the number of houses from 73 to 296.

The architect of the houses at Charlemont Square is not known with certainty. C. E. B. Brett suggests that John Hardy, a civil engineer appointed as company architect in 1881, may have carried out some 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 Natural Stone Database records that the houses were originally constructed of Newry Granodiorite, quarried locally on the former Charlemont Estate. Granite from the Bessbrook quarry is of high quality and was used in the construction of Manchester Town Hall and the great steps of St George's Hall in Liverpool.

Charlemont Square does not appear on the second edition Ordnance Survey map of 1861, but construction had commenced by 1862. In that year Griffith's Valuation noted that Charlemont Square West (captioned "new row") was the only side of the square to have been completed, though all 26 of its buildings remained unoccupied. The remaining buildings around the square were 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 containing stipulations regarding the keeping of fowl and pigs, which were not permitted within the family quarters or yard, though a pig-sty and fowl-run were allowed in the garden. A further clause required tenants to send their children to school until they were old enough for mill work.

No. 7 Charlemont Square North was initially let by the Bessbrook Spinning Company to a Mr Daniel Latimer and valued at £8. Occupants changed frequently over the following decades, though the value 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 also depicted within the central green on this plan). The Census of Ireland records that in 1911 the house was occupied by Alexander Seaton, a flax dresser whose family were also employed by the Bessbrook Spinning Company as linen yarn rollers. The census building return described the house as a second-class dwelling consisting of eight rooms.

Under the First General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1936–57) the house was occupied by the Gray family, who remained there until at least the 1970s, and had increased in value to £10. During the 20th century the mill continued to expand and gain international recognition, and during the Second World War the mill workers were engaged in supplying cloth for military uniforms. The Bessbrook Spinning Company retained ownership of housing along Charlemont Square until the 1960s, when the dwellings began to be sold to private individuals and firms; the majority of houses along the square were purchased around 1970 by C. R. Morrow, a local car and farm machinery dealer. The post-war downturn in the textile market foreshadowed the closure of the mill in 1972, after which it was occupied by the British Army. No. 7 Charlemont Square North was purchased outright by James Gray in 1968 and its value was increased to £15 and 10 shillings under the Second General Revaluation (1956–72).

The house 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." 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 English model villages at Saltaire (1852), Port Sunlight (1888), and Bourneville (developed by the Cadbury family from 1895), which "have directly influenced town and country planning all over the world." Bessbrook is thus internationally significant as an early planned mill village, predating and contemporaneous with those more widely cited English examples.

Around 1991 the house underwent extensive renovation, including the reconstruction of the dormer window and the addition of cast iron rainwater goods (since replaced with uPVC). At the time of the second survey the house continued in use as a private dwelling, retaining its overall Victorian character despite alterations to the dormer, windows, and facade material.