67 Court Street

The Department's description

Exterior description and setting

Modernised three bay two storey terraced house on the South side of Court Street, 40 m from Newtownards Priory. The front elevation is rendered with pebble dash with a hardwood partially glazed door with sidelights to the right and a central top hung picture window to the centre. To the left is a square headed vehicular entrance with painted timber doors. There are three further windows to the first floor - all uPVC. The roof is covered with fibre cement slates and there is a plain smooth rendered off centre chimney stack.

The rear elevation is smooth rendered with a series of irregularly sized and positioned steel top hung windows to the frst floor and a uPVC one to the ground floor. To the left is a single storey lean-to return with a uPVC door and window. Beyond the return and attached to it, is a lean-to open sided store and beyond that a small stone walled store with a pitched roof which is heavily overgrown. This store may date from the original construction of Court Street in the 1840's. The rear garden is rectangular and very long with a large mid-twentieth century lightweight builder's workshop constructed of smooth rendered concrete block walls and a corrugated sheet roof. At the bottom of the garden is a further lean to shed, of little architectural interest.

Setting: This house which was substantially modernised in the mid-twentith century stands towards the Eastern end of a terrace of two storey rendered houses that were constructed in the 1840's and are now within the Court Street/Court Square Area of Townscape Character. Some of these have been demolished and some of the remainder are in poor condition. To the East, 40m, is the former Newtownards Dominican Priory, a Monument in State Care.

Historical information

Court Street appears to have been laid out in the 1840s, taking its name from the fact that the nearby medieval priory served as a court house between 1817 and 1850. The revised OS map of 1858 shows that the south side had been completely developed by this date, with a long unbroken terrace stretching along the entire length and including (apparently) this former house.
The property was still a dwelling house when first surveyed in October 1972 and has remained in this use since. The current owner states that hisfather made substantial alterations during the mid twentieth century.

For more historical information on Court Street see ref. HB24/13/041

References- Primary sources
1 PRONI D.654 Londonderry Papers [This collection contains many documents relating to the development of Newtownards.]
2 PRONI OS Maps 1st ed. 1834, Co. Down 6.
3 PRONI OS Maps 1st rev. 1858-60, Co. Down 6.
4 Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland Vol.7: Parishes of County Down II, ed. Angelique Day and Patrick McWilliams (QUB 1991), pp.105-106.
5 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.]
6 UFTM WAG 944 W.A. Green Collection- Photograph of the old priory and Court Street, c.1910.

Secondary sources
1 Trevor McCavery 'Newtown: a history of Newtownards' (Dundonald 1994), pp.35, 80, 117, 146, 159, 190.

Criteria for listing: architectural interest

Not listed

Criteria for listing: historic interest

Not listed

Evaluation

This terrace house was originally constructed in the late Georgian period but was substantially altered in the mid twentieth century with the insertion of wider window openings to the front and rear elevations and the modernisation of the interior. Little evidence remains of the building's original character which presumably would have included narrower small paned sliding sash windows and a panelled door to the front elevation. It is now a building of little architectural interest.