Survey Data
Reg No
13008013
Rating
Regional
Categories of Special Interest
Architectural, Social
Original Use
House
In Use As
House
Date
1895 - 1900
Coordinates
213490, 275426
Date Recorded
01/09/2005
Date Updated
--/--/--
Description
Group of nineteen terraced two-bay two-storey gable-fronted local authority house, built 1898, with box bay window to ground floors and overhanging upper floors supported on limestone corbels. Pitched slate and artificial slate roofs with (shared) diagonally placed rendered chimneystacks and red brick chimneystacks with blue brick course and cap. Timber bargeboards to gables, cast-iron and replacement rainwater goods. Painted roughcast rendered walls to upper floor and hammer finished coursed limestone construction to the ground floor (many now rendered). Square-headed window openings with a variety of replacement windows and painted sills. Square-headed doorways with a variety of replacement doors and overlights. Road-fronted to the west side of St. Mel’s Road and to the east of Longford Town centre.
Appraisal
An attractive terrace of nineteen of twenty houses along a uniform terrace of twenty local authority houses (see 13002297 for other record). Despite individual alteration, this terrace retains its early character and a form derived from the Arts and Crafts movement. This widely influential late-nineteenth century movement belonged to a period when the domination of historical styles was being questioned and many architects were looking for inspiration to vernacular buildings of the countryside, in this case the English countryside. This terrace was built by the Longford Town Commissioners and dates to a period when a great many houses of this type were built in Ireland following the passing of the various Land and Labourers’ Acts (c. 1883 - 1921) by the British Parliament in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, and they are a feature of the outskirts of many of the larger Irish towns. The vast majority of these buildings are now altered, as is the case along this terrace. This terrace is among the most attractive examples of its type in north Leinster and is an integral element of the architectural heritage of County Longford. This terrace was reputedly built using masonry taken from the old jail/prison on Battery Road, Longford Town. These buildings may have been built to designs by William Richard Gleave (1868 – 1933), an English architect who won a competition (there were sixty-seven entries) to design forty artisans’ cottages for the Earl of Longford 1896 - 7.