Historic Building Details

HB Ref No:
HB19/13/004

Address :
35 Castle Street Lisburn County Antrim BT27 4SP

Townland:
Lisnagarvy

---

Survey 2:
B+

Date of Listing:
08/10/1981 00:00:00

Date of De-listing:

Current Use:
University/ College Building

Former Use
University/ College Building

Conservation Area:
Yes

Industrial Archaeology:
No

Vernacular:
No

Thatched:
No

Monument:
No

Derelict:
No

---

OS Map No:
165/06

IG Ref:
J2693 6444

---

Owner Category

Exterior Description And Setting

Detached five-bay two-storey over basement with attic-storey redbrick and stucco neo-classical former house, built c.1880, facing south with red sandstone front portico and single-storey bow to rear garden elevation with perron, set slightly back on the north side of Castle Street within its own grounds. Formerly called Wallace House, the building was converted for use as The Municipal Technical Institute in 1913, later to become South Eastern Regional College, recently vacated to new premises. Restored in 1993. Natural slate mansard roof with roll-moulded black clay ridge tiles to the upper section having pair of rendered and redbrick profiled chimneystacks, lead ridges to the lower section with fish-scale slates and lead-lined segmental-headed dormers behind balustraded parapet wall and further brick chimneystacks to either end, detailed as above. Cast-iron square-profile downpipes break through parapet walls to rear and side elevations. Redbrick walling laid in Flemish bond with rusticated quoins and rusticated stone walling below the ground floor sill course on moulded stucco plinth course. String course below first floor continuous sill course with architrave, frieze and dentilated deep cornice below parapet wall with scrolled modillions and lead lining over. Square-headed window openings with moulded architrave surrounds and moulded sills with 6/6 timber sash windows, unless otherwise stated. Symmetrical five-bay front elevation with single-bay shallow breakfront to prostyle tetrastyle red sandstone Doric portico complete with full entablature and balustraded parapet. Columns rest on sandstone plinth with central square-headed door opening having pair of glazed timber panelled doors and overlight, flanked by Doric sandstone pilasters, pair of slender sidelights and further pair of pilasters. Door opens onto three stone steps to front cobble-lock area. Ground floor window openings have pediments supported on scrolled console brackets, while the first floor windows have simple cornice above. Opening onto the roof of the portico is a tripartite window opening with segmental-pediment supported on scrolled console brackets to the centre with double-leaf glazed doors and overlight, flanked by pair of 2/2 sidelights. To west side is a curved wing wall in brick with stone dressings connecting house to adjavent property and partly enclosing the front garden. West side elevation has a breakfront to either end, corresponding to the chimneybreasts and having quoins. To the centre bay at first floor level is a Palladian window opening with fluted pilasters, Corinthian capitals and modillion cornice and archivolt over. To the ground floor is a pedimented Doric doorcase with round-headed door opening, timber flat-panelled door and sidelights. West side elevation is now overshadowed by large extension to No.33 (HB19/13/003). External steel fire stairase afixed to wall. North garden elevation with breakfront as per front elevation having semi-circular single-storey bow with fluted pilasters on continuous moulded sill course and rusticated walling rising to a full Doric entablature and iron railing above. Curved 6/6 timber sash windows and double-leaf glazed doors to the centre open onto circular stone-clad platform with nosed steps to perron, all having decorative cast-iron railings (mostly removed and broken to steps). Tripartite window opening above the bay with lugged architrave surrounds and double-leaf glazed doors flanked by 2/2 sidelights. Remaining window openings having lugged architrave surrounds and cornice to the ground floor openings only. Multi-bay east side elevation abutted by glazed passageway connecting to neighbouring 1960s educational building, part rendered to north end. Set slightly back on the north side of Castle Street enclosed to the street by replacement steel railings on low replacement brick wall with replacement steel gates. Multi-bay multi-storey brick and concrete college building to the east, built c.1965 enclosed to the street by same railings, backing onto Wallace Avenue to the north. Roof Natural slate RWG Square-profile cast-iron Walling Redbrick / stucco mouldings Windows Timber sash

Architects

MacHenry, John Ambler, Thomas Benjamin

Historical Information

The Technical College was formerly called Wallace House and Castle House, and was built in 1878-80 as the Lisburn home for Sir Richard Wallace (1818–1890), baronet, philanthropist and art collector. Wallace lived for much of his early life in Paris where his father, Lord Hertford, was also living and collecting art and he was eventually employed as his father’s secretary and saleroom agent. When Lord Hertford died in 1870, Wallace inherited his father’s collections and his unentailed property in Paris, London and Ireland. He used his fortune in philanthropic works – in particular, during the Prussian siege of Paris (1870-1), he gave £12,000 towards a field hospital and subscribed £4000 for victims of shelling. For these acts of generosity, he was made a member of the Légion d'honneur and in August 1971 received a baronetcy from Queen Victoria. He then presented the city of Paris with fifty cast-iron drinking fountains, still in use today and known as wallaces. In February 1873, he made a celebrated visit to Lisburn where he received a tumultuous welcome, his father having had little to do with his Irish estates. Wallace continued to extend his father’s art collection and moved much of it from Paris to Hertford House in London. He established his right to the Hertford estates in Ireland after some litigation and was Conservative MP for Lisburn from 1873 to 1885. (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) Wallace became the principal benefactor of the city, paying for the improvement of water supplies as well as the building of Assembly Rooms, a court house (now demolished) and a school, which survives as Wallace High School. Wallace also employed the architect Thomas Ambler, who had remodelled Hertford House for him, to design Castle House. Wallace had hoped that his son Edmond would take up residence in Lisburn, but this was not to be and Castle House was only rarely used. (Dixon “So Many Proofs?”) After his death in 1890, Wallace’s estate and art collection was inherited by his wife, Lady Wallace, and on her death in 1897 she bequeathed the contents of Hertford House to the nation as the Wallace Collection, Hertford House, itself, becoming the museum in which the collection is housed. The citizens of Lisburn erected a monument to Sir Richard Wallace in Castle Gardens, where one of two Wallace fountains in the city may also be found. Wallace’s name lives on elsewhere in Lisburn, in Wallace High School and in Wallace Park. (www.wallacecollection.org) The house is shown drawn onto the valuation town plan dating from 1877 to c1898 and enters valuation records in 1878 when the valuer notes, ‘two houses taken down and a new house in progress’, ‘Sir Richard Wallace in fee, house (in progress) and garden’. One of the buildings that was demolished was called ‘Marquis House’ and had been occupied by Dean Stannus as the Marquess of Hertford’s agent. The following fieldbook records the current house with a value of £215 in 1881. The same year ‘offices’ and a ‘pleasure ground’ are added to the description. In 1883 a ‘new coach house with a storey and a half over’ has been added to the plot and the value is therefore increased to £235. According to Dixon, the house was designed by Thomas Benjamin Ambler, Architect of Leeds, who had previously remodelled Hertford House for Wallace. The building of the house was supervised by Wallace’s local surveyor and engineer, John MacHenry, who Dixon believes may well have designed some of the details. It is believed in many quarters that Castle House and Hertford House are identical. Dixon shows, however, that although there are similarities, Hertford House is much larger and its facade much more complex than Castle House. Dixon also reminds us that the houses differ internally, “Hertford House was not totally built for Wallace but remodelled from a large house built for the Duke of Manchester a hundred years earlier. The front door leads straight to a great central double-return staircase. In [Castle] House, the staircase, though large, occupies a side space, subordinate to a central galleried hall which was clearly designed for the display of large paintings and other works of art. This was to have been the most important space in the house, and the most important feature in a great axial composition. The old house was demolished so that the new could be set back from the street line thus using the neighbours as a frame, a favourite Victorian way of giving the central building importance. From the front gate a visitor would travel right along the axis, through the front garden, under the portico, and into a fine entrance hall. Here the excellent woodwork of the doors and classical details would be admired. More central double doors gave access to the great galleried hall, and beyond this to a central saloon with a curved bow window, through which the back garden could be viewed; and visited, because below the window a double-curved staircase led to an inner formal garden with seven flights of steps; and beyond to the wider parkland with its great ranges of glasshouses”. (Dixon, “So Many Proofs?”) In 1899 the property was taken over by Sir John Murray Scott who was Lady Wallace’s secretary and inherited much of her property and estates on her death. In 1910 it is noted that the valuation of the house decreases from £230 to £200. Mackey states that Scott is credited with having stripped the house of its ‘eighteenth century fireplaces, tapestries, furniture and other objets d’art’. It does not appear that Scott ever lived in the house and he died in 1912 leaving the house unoccupied. The valuation fieldmap dating from 1907-c1927 captions the house ‘Castle House’. (Mackey, p.80) In 1914 it was opened as the new Municipal Technical Institute. It is listed in Annual Revisions of 1915 as the Technical School and garden occupied by Lisburn Urban District Council who own it in fee, and valued at £117. In 1923 the records note that two rooms on the ground floor are being used as an employment exchange. The house was used as a Technical College until recently, and has now been vacated. ‘Lisburn the town and its people’ carries photographs of the house shortly after its opening as a Technical College (p.80), of Sir Richard Wallace himself (p.44) and of John MacHenry, the Hertford estate surveyor who supervised the building of the house (Mackey, p.40). References: Primary Sources 1. PRONI OS/6/1/68/3 – Third Edition OS Map c1900 2. PRONI OS/6/1/68/4 – Fourth Edition OS Map 1921 3. PRONI OS/6/1/68/5 – Fifth Edition OS Map 1939 4. PRONI VAL/12/B/8/9A-T – Annual Revisions (1863-1924) 5. PRONI VAL/12/E/40/1/ – Annual Revisions Town Plan (1877-c1898) 6. PRONI VAL/12/E/40/2/ – Annual Revisions Town Plan (1898-c1907) 7. PRONI VAL/12/E/40/4 – Annual Revisions Town Plan (1907-c1927) Secondary Sources 1. Burns, J.F. ‘The Life and Work of Sir Richard Wallace Bart M.P.’ in Lisburn Historical Society Journal, Volume 3, 1980 (available at www.lisburn.com) 2. Dixon, H ‘So Many Proofs? Aspects of the Legacy of Sir Richard Wallace in the fabric of Lisburn’ in Lisburn Historical Society Journal, Volume 4, December 1982 (available at www.lisburn.com) 3. Mackey, Brian “Lisburn, the Town and its People, 1873-1973” Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000 4. www.oxforddnb.com – Oxford Dictionary of National Biography online 5. www.wallacecollection.org – Wallace Collection website

Criteria for Listing

Architectural Interest

A. Style B. Proportion C. Ornamentation D. Plan Form H-. Alterations detracting from building I. Quality and survival of Interior J. Setting K. Group value

Historic Interest

V. Authorship W. Northern Ireland/International Interest

Evaluation

Detached five-bay redbrick and stucco former house opposite Castle Gardens dating from 1880. Known as Wallace House or Castle House, this redbrick and stucco-fronted former house in the classical style, built for Richard Wallace to display his art and collections, has been in institutional use for a prolonged period during the twentieth century. The late Victorian detailing to both the exterior and interior exhibits high quality classical decoration executed in both plaster and timber is complemented by a simple layout around a central top-lit double-height hall. Retaining most original features throughout, the building contains one of the most decorative interiors in Lisburn overlooking Castle Gardens to the south, both created and given to the city by the benefactor Richard Wallace. This former house has group value with the other listed builings and structures in Lisburn erected by the Wallace family.

General Comments

Date of Survey

01 April 2010