113-117 Frances Street

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Site (on the S side of Frances Street to the E of Newtownards town centre) of three, two storey, terrace houses, now demolished with modern petrol station now occupying the general site.

Description from 1st Survey card "2/sty block of 3 houses. Roof slated. RH gable end. Chimneys rendered. Wall rendered, lined and painted. 8 F/Fl D/H windows, no astragals. Gr/Fl has doorway - D/H window as above - wide 2 pane square window with pilasters, freize lintel and top moulding - doorway - 2 D/H windows as above - doorway and one pane window joined with sheeted door. Central "Ards" doorway has blocked pilasters plain s/c archivolt and keystone, decorated fanlight and flush door. L/H and R/H end doorways have blocked pilasters, stilted lintel surround with keystone, plian fanlight. L/H door flush panelled. R/H door pannelled."

Historical information

Frances Street was laid out in c.1817 as part of a new broad thoroughfare to link the new coach road from Belfast to the Donaghadee Road. It appears to have replaced the much narrower Back Lane, which is shown on Colville’s 1720 plan of the town. The OS Map of 1834 shows that by this stage the western side of the street had been developed, but the eastern end (then known as ‘Little Frances Street’) was largely bare on the south side. This particular site, however, appears to have been built upon by that date, thus (assuming that Frances Street was indeed created by widening Back Lane and assuming that all of the former properties on both sides of the former Back Lane were swept away in the process) indicating that the houses which stood on this site until recently may have been built between c.1811 and c.1834.

The OS Memoirs (c.1834) make reference to the erection of new houses by the Marquis of Londonderry at this time for which he was ‘granting leases for 60 years or 3 lives at a rate of 1s per foot, upon which they can get the house erected at the rate of 1s per foot’.

The valuation records of c.1836 state that the block on this site consisted of ‘three houses exempt’ (i.e. below rateable value).

References- Primary sources
1 ‘The town and tenements of Newtown in the County of Down...1720’ reprinted in Trevor McCavery 'Newtown: a history of Newtownards (Dundonald 1994) p.79. Though the author of this book gives no reference as to this map, the original undoubtedly belongs to the Colville estate maps contained within the Londonderry Papers [PRONI D.654/M1A].
2 PRONI D.654/M36-38B Londonderry Papers- Maps of tenements in Frances Street 1828.
3 PRONI OS Maps 1st ed. 1834, Co. Down 6.
4 PRONI VAL 1B/34 p.101 1st valuation Newtownards parish, Newtownards, c.1836 (see also associated town plan).
5 PRONI OS Maps 1st rev. 1858-60, Co. Down 6.
6 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Vol.7: Parishes of County Down II, ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1991), pp.105-106.
7 PRONI 2nd (‘Griffith’s’) valuation, Newtownards parish, Newtownards 1863. [The town plan to accompany the 2nd valuation does not appear to be held at PRONI thus making it difficult to match the information contained within the written record with actual buildings.]

Secondary sources
1 Trevor McCavery 'Newtown: a history of Newtownards' (Dundonald 1994), pp.105-7.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Site of two two storey houses of possible early nineteenth century origin, demolished post 1972 with petrol station now on general site.