37 Main Street

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Varied two storey terrace containing shops and dwellings set within the northern half of Main Street in the village of Kircubbin.

No.37 (HB24/02/005C) has a flying lease over No.35.

To the left on the front façade is a combined large ‘store’ door and entrance door. The entrance door is timber panelled with a semi-circular fanlight above. This fanlight is only partly glazed as it rises into the level of the first floor joists and is blocked at its top. Both door and fanlight are set in a reveal with pilasters and plain moulding to semi-circular arch. [This doorway is very similar to those seen on many terraced dwellings in Newtownards.] Adjoining the entrance to the left is a large, but low, ‘store’ door with plain sheeted timber double doors encased with pilasters and lintel, with the right hand pilaster joined to that to the left of the entrance door. To the right of the entrance is a sliding sash and case window with horizontal and vertical astragals. To the first floor are three similar windows but with moulded surrounds with keystones. The upper floor windows are directly above the ground floor openings, with little or no gap between both floors. Thus the first floor appears to be ‘bearing down’ on the lower level and the whole arrangement looks cramped and awkward, suggesting perhaps that this section of the terrace has either had its roof raised at some point or its upper floor window openings enlarged. Nos.35-37 are finished in plain render.

There is a large dilapidated looking full height gabled return-like store (which does not appear to be internally linked to the house) to the rear of Nos.35-37, built in rubble with brick dressings and partly rendered, with small upper level windows to the NW side. To the SE side of this return a more recent looking full height hipped roof extension (with chimney stack) has been constructed.

Historical information

A terrace is shown on this site on the OS map of 1834. The owner of Nos.35-37 has deeds dating back to 1784, however, one suspects that this section of the terrace, with its large upper floor windows, may have had its facade altered [?or roof raised] perhaps c.1840-50. Both properties belonged to a member of the locally important Herron family, William Herron, in the middle decades of the nineteenth century and have been in possession of the Maxwell family since 1899. Photographs dating from c.1910 show the shop and the house much the same as today. The same photographs, however, reveal that No.33 had what appears to be a small shop or office front where the two windows to the left of the entrance are now, and two more chimney stacks which have since been removed. This building once served as the local RIC station (though locals claim that No.65 Main Street also fulfilled the same purpose). No.41 used to be a house but has been a hardware shop, and is now a chip shop, and as a consequence its facade has been greatly altered.

References- Primary sources
1 Pigot & Co.s “City of Dublin and Hibernian Provincial Directory” (Manchester 1824), pp. 417-18. [Description of the town of Kircubbin etc. in c.1824. See also Slater’s “Directory” for 1846, 1856 and 1870, original copies of which are currently held at the Linenhall Library, Belfast.]
2 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps, 1st Edition, 1834, Co. Down 18.
3 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Vol.7: Parishes of County Down II, ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1991), p. 84-5. [c.1834]
4 PRONI VAL 1B/311A & B 1st valuation, Inishargy, c.1835.
5 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps, 1st revision, 1860, Co. Down 18.
6 PRONI 2nd valuation, Inishargy, c.1863.
7 UFTM WAG 1835, 1837 W.A. Green Collection- Photographs of Main Street, Kircubbin, c.1910.
8 PRONI D.3302 Heron Family Papers. [These papers are not listed and therefore currently unavailable, but could well repay some future investigation in relation to these properties.]

Secondary sources
1. Joan Maxwell, ‘Notes on the Herron Family’ in Journal of the Upper Ards Historical Society, No.17 (1993), pp. 18-19.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

A. Style
B. Proportion
C. Ornamentation
H-. Alterations detracting from building

Criteria for listing: historic interest

X. Local Interest

Evaluation

Two storey terrace block of possible late 18th century origin, large sections of which have been much altered in fairly recent times.
The facade of Nos.35 and 37 with its informal arrangement possesses a certain quirkiness which may indicate that this section at least may have began life as single storey