31 Main Street

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Recently converted two storey terraced, gabled shop on the E side of Main Street, Millisle.

Front W facade has a timber sheeted door to the far left with large adjacent (at right side) slightly ‘bowed’, modern multi pane shop window. Window rests on brick ‘stall riser’. To the right is a panelled and glazed shop door with similar, but larger, ‘bowed’ modern shop window to immediate right. ‘Stall riser’ as before under window. Both this door and window are set in a recess. Above the shop front is a long-ish timber shop sign. There are no first floor openings on this facade. The front facade is finished in plain render with chamfered quoins to the right edge.

The whole of the ground floor at the rear is taken up with a large flat roofed extension with modern doors and windows. To the first floor is a central flat roofed half dormer with modern window frame. Modern window to far left.

The roof is pitched with asbestos free slates and three Velux windows to the front and one to the rear. PVC rw goods. This building is now, to all intents and purposes, entirely modern, bearing no resemblance to its former self.

Historical information

A building appears on this site on the OS Maps of 1833/4 and 1858-60. When first surveyed in 1973 this property (then a house and doctor’s surgery) had three first floor window openings, sash frames with ‘Georgian’ panes throughout, and some (probably late nineteenth century) moulded surrounds to the windows and front door. In 1985, however, this building was converted to a coffee shop, completely losing its (largely original) facades, roof, and its interior in the process, so that today it looks entirely modern throughout.

References- Primary sources
1 PRONI VAL 1B/32 Valuation records for the townland of Ballymacruise (Parish of Donaghadee) 1830s.
2 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps 1st Edition 1833/4.
3 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Vol.7: Parishes of County Down II, ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1991), p. 50.
4 PRONI Ordnance Survey Maps 1st Revision 1858-60.
5 PRONI ‘Griffith’s’ valuation for the townland of Ballymacruise (Parish of Donaghadee) 1863.
6 PRONI D.1167 Dunleath Papers. [The Mulhollands came into possession of much land in Millisle area in the 1840s, conceivably there may be be leases relating to the above property within this collection.]
7 Photographs of Main Street Millisle in the early twentieth century reprinted in Grace Seymour 'Echoes of Millisle and district' (Rathfriland ?c.1983), pp.26-30 etc.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Former two storey terrace house of possible early nineteenth century origin how converted to a coffee shop and completely modernised in the process. This building bears no resemblance to its former self.