House

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Derelict remains of a small two storey gabled house, off the S side of E Street (near No.7) built in rubble with brick dressings to openings to the N facade. This facade has at least one window opening to the ground and the first floor, with the remains of a sash frame, with Georgian panes, to that on the ground floor. To the left of this window is an odd rubble pier with brick quoins. The right hand side of this facade has collapsed.

It was impossible to observe the other facades. The S facade appears now to be joined to the rear return of a building on Frances Street (to the S of East Street). The roof still retains much of its Bangor blue slates. Tall rendered chimney stack to E gable.

Historical information

The writers were informed by a local resident that this house was ‘Jacobean’ and was one of many which once fronted a former laneway which has since disappeared. This seems extremely unlikely, however, given the overall apparent regularity of the construction, the machined look of the roof and ceiling timbers and the remains of the window frames. A building appears to be shown on this site on the 1834 map, and the remnants an outline of a laneway, just to the north, appears to be indicated, but no evidence of a laneway (or buildings) is shown on this site is shown Colville’s estate map of 1720, implying that this particular structure is mid eighteenth century at the earliest. However, in the absence of a thorough investigation of this building it is difficult to conjecture as to its age or its original function. Its siting suggests that it may merely have served as an outbuilding at the rear of one of the large terrace dwellings in Frances Street, and, by implication, date from 1817 (when Frances Street was laid out) at the very earliest.

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 OS Maps 1st ed. 1834, Co. Down 6.
3 PRONI VAL 1B/34 p.107 1st valuation Newtownards parish, Newtownards, c.1836 (see also associated town plan).
4 PRONI OS Maps 1st rev. 1858-60, Co. Down 6.
5 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Vol.7: Parishes of County Down II, ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1991), pp.105-106.

Secondary sources
1 Trevor McCavery 'Newtown: a history of Newtownards' (Dundonald 1994), pp.183-4.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

Badly dilapidated remains of a small, rubble built, two storey ‘house’ set between East Street and Frances Street. Locals claim this building is ‘Jacobean’ (i.e. seventeenth century), but the available evidence appears to suggest that it is probably much later in date and may merely be an early nineteenth century outbuilding built to serve one of the terrace dwellings on Frances Street.