7 Charlemont Square East, Bessbrook, Co.Armagh

7 Charlemont Square East is a modest two-storey, two-bay mid-Victorian terraced house built between 1862 and 1866, forming part of one of the most historically significant planned mill villages in the British Isles. The house and its yard walling are listed together.

ARCHITECTURAL DESCRIPTION

The building has a rectangular plan facing southwest and sits mid-terrace, flush with the main run of houses along the eastern side of Charlemont Square. Its walls are of 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. The window heads have generally been squared off with painted smooth cement render. The roof is pitched fibre cement with angled black clay ridge tiles. A rectangular-section red brick chimney with two terracotta clay pots rises to the northwest. The eaves are flush with a red brick corbel course below. Rainwater goods are uPVC half-round guttering discharging to circular-section downpipes.

The front elevation is nearly symmetrical. A modest paved front yard is enclosed by smooth cement-rendered dwarf walling topped with modern replacement galvanised metal scrollwork railings, with a matching foot gate to the southeast. A concrete path leads from the gate to the entrance door, which is positioned to the southeast of the facade. The door is painted timber with a square panel to the lower half, four glazed square sections to the upper half, and brass furniture. Above, the facade has a regular pattern of fenestration: two windows at first-floor level aligned with the two ground-floor openings, all fitted with 1/1 single-glazed timber sash windows — replacements for the original windows.

To the northwest, the building is attached to No. 8 Charlemont Square East, and to the southeast it is attached to No. 6 Charlemont Square East. Access to the rear northeast elevation is limited. Where visible, the rear walls are of roughcast cement render, and there are two first-floor window openings with later top-and-side-opening timber casement windows. A single-storey monopitched outbuilding extends into the yard to the northeast boundary; its roof is corrugated Perspex, its walls are roughcast, and a planked painted timber door opens onto the rear access route, with a timber casement window to the left of the door.

The original roof slates and windows have been replaced, which detracts somewhat from the building's authenticity, though the external character of the house is otherwise well preserved.

SETTING AND GROUP VALUE

No. 7 forms part of Charlemont Square, a formally designed square comprising 66 buildings in total arranged along three sides — east, north, and west — around a central green. The eastern terrace consists of 27 similar two-storey houses together with five larger two-and-a-half-storey shop buildings at its southeastern end; the western terrace has a similar arrangement with one shop building. The northern terrace is the shortest at eight houses wide, but these are distinctly larger two-and-a-half-storey paired buildings. The square is primarily accessed from Fountain Street to the southeast.

Each house along the east and west terraces is set back from the perimeter road and footpath behind a modest front yard enclosed by dwarf walling topped with hooped metal railings. The terraces are stepped in groups of two dwellings to respect the subtle relief of the site. Rear yards are generally larger, enclosed by random-coursed rubble stone walling with a square-headed doorway opening onto a wide rear access route; rear facades are much altered with extensions of various shapes and sizes. The front facades are nearly uniform along the east and west terraces. 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 contains a monument to the installation of electric lighting in 1911, and Bessbrook's War Memorial is located centrally to the southeast of the playground.

HISTORICAL CONTEXT

The village of Bessbrook grew from a site known as 'The Green', renamed after Elizabeth (Bess) Pollock, wife of John Pollock, who opened the first woollen mill and bleach green there in 1761. By the 1830s, the First Edition Ordnance Survey map recorded little built development beyond Mount Caulfield House and a number of thread manufactories and bleach mills.

The village as it exists 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 one of the derelict mills on the site and began building 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, so on looking around, fixed upon a place near Newry … with water power and a thick population around, and in a country district where flax was cultivated in considerable quantities.' His layout of the village was influenced by the work of William Penn, the American Quaker responsible for planning Philadelphia in the late 17th century.

Bessbrook was established as a model village and social experiment in several phases, beginning with the laying out of Fountain Street in the 1840s. Richardson's philanthropic aims led him to recruit the poor, the unqualified, and beggars from the surrounding countryside, hoping to improve their circumstances. The village became well known as a settlement without the 'Three Ps': there was no public house, no pawn shop, and therefore, in Richardson's view, no need for police. In place of a public house, Richardson provided recreational and educational facilities at the Institute, a number of well-stocked shops at Nos. 1–5 Charlemont Square East, and distributed milk, tea and cocoa to his mill workers. The majority of the population voted to preserve these arrangements in the 1870s, and there remains no public house in Bessbrook to this day. 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 shares. The local linen industry experienced a significant boom during the American Civil War (1861–65), when disruption to American cotton supplies increased demand for linen. Richardson expanded both his factory and his workforce considerably at this time. In 1865, Lord Charlemont sold the remainder of the Camlough Estate to Richardson, making him the principal landowner and employer at Bessbrook. Charlemont Square was laid out between 1862 and 1866 to accommodate the influx of new 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 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 the expansion of the mill buildings. The terraces were built by masons and joiners employed by the Bessbrook Spinning Company. The Newry Granodiorite used for the walls was quarried locally on the former Charlemont Estate; granite from Bessbrook Quarry is of high quality and was also used in the construction of Manchester Town Hall and the great steps of St. George's Hall, Liverpool.

Charlemont Square does not appear 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 completed side of the square, with all 26 of its buildings unoccupied. The remaining sides were completed and occupied by at least 1866.

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 various conditions, including stipulations about the keeping of fowl and pigs (which were not to be kept in the family quarters or yard, though a pigsty and fowl-run were permitted in the garden), and an obligation to send children to school until they were old enough for mill work. Each house had a garden or yard containing an eighth of an acre.

No. 7 Charlemont Square East was initially let by the Bessbrook Spinning Company to a Mr. William Hunter, valued at £5 and 10 shillings. The occupants changed frequently over the following decades, though the valuation remained unaltered until the 1950s. By 1911, according to the Census of Ireland, the house was occupied by Hugh McElherron, a linen weaver employed by the Bessbrook Spinning Company; the census building return described it as a second-class dwelling of five rooms. The McElherron family continued to live at the address until at least the 1970s. Maria and Annie McElherron purchased the house outright in 1968; by the end of the Second General Revaluation of Property in Northern Ireland (1956–72), the house was valued at £7 and 10 shillings.

The Ordnance Survey Town Plan of 1906 depicted the house in its current layout. During the Second World War, the mill workers at Bessbrook were engaged in supplying cloth for military uniforms. The Bessbrook Spinning Company retained ownership of housing along the square until the 1960s, when the dwellings began to be sold to private individuals and firms; the majority were purchased by C. R. Morrow, a local car and farm machinery dealer, around 1970. This disposal of property was necessitated by the post-war downturn in the local textile market, which foreshadowed the closure of the mill in 1972. The mill building was subsequently occupied by the British Army.

No. 7 Charlemont Square East was listed in 1981. Bessbrook Conservation Area was designated in 1983 in recognition of the village's historical significance as a planned mill village and its distinct form and character. The 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 English model villages at Saltaire (1852), Port Sunlight (1888), and Bourneville (developed by the Cadbury family in 1895), which have in turn directly influenced town and country planning all over the world. Bessbrook predates both Port Sunlight and Bourneville, giving it considerable international significance as an early example of planned industrial housing rooted in Quaker ideological beliefs. At the time of the second survey, No. 7 continued to be used as a private dwelling.