The house and its smaller neighbours
at nos.2 and 4 College Green were designed in 1870 by James McKinnon
for a merchant called Archibald McCollum. It is not clear whether
McCollum ever lived here, but by 1880 the house had become a Church
of Ireland Collegiate School (traces of the school name can still
be seen over one of the corner windows). In 1890 the house was
occupied as a private residence once more, by John MacCormac,
physician to the Belfast Institution for Nervous Diseases Paralysis
and Epilepsy, and in 1891 it was acquired by John McConnell, managing
director of Messrs Dunville & Co, whiskey distillers, who
lived there until his death in 1928.
McConnell was a JP and a freemason, and a friend of James Craig,
first prime minister of Northern Ireland (whose father owned Dunville's).
He had a car that was kept in the former coach house, and employed
a chauffeur to drive it. His five children were brought up at
College Green House, and most of them developed liberal views
that must have shocked their establishment father. Notable amongst
them was his youngest daughter Mabel, who became a suffragette
and a committee member of the Gaelic League. For a while after
she graduated from Queen's University she was a secretary to George
Bernard Shaw and to George Moore, but then she met and eloped
with Desmond FitzGerald, a young English poet of Irish extraction.
Although he continued his literary interests, being an acquaintance
of Ezra Pound and T S Eliot, FitzGerald became heavily involved
with the Irish Volunteers in Kerry in 1913. It is recorded that
Mabel and Desmond spent Christmas 1913 at College Green House,
before having tea with James Connolly after a republican meeting.
The couple also met with Roger Casement on this Belfast visit
before going back to Kerry, where Desmond organised and drilled
volunteers. He went on to fight in the Easter Rising of 1916 and
to become a Minister in the Irish Free State government that ensued.
College Green House must therefore have hosted gatherings of very
different political persuasions over the years, particularly as
the first Northern Ireland Parliament met in the Assembly College
which the house overlooks and it is not unlikely that McConnell
would have been visited by his old friend James Craig at the end
of the day for tea or billiards. Mabel's fourth son, Garret, must
have absorbed some of this political atmosphere as he went on
to become a Taoiseach aware of his Belfast roots as well as his
Dublin ones. We are indebted to him for the magnificent photograph
of the house as it was about 1890 when his grandfather went to
live there.
On McConnell's death the house passed to new owners, who unfortunately
subdivided the house very crudely into flats in 1934. The early
occupants of the flats were genteel, including spinsters, academics
and at least one man of the cloth. In the 1950s they acquired
an artistic neighbour, a civil servant by the name of Alfred Armentières
Kitchener Arnold, who hosted many of the local artists of his
day from visiting actors and dancers to artists like George McCann
and Dan O'Neill and writers like Louis MacNeice. Arnold was a
keen amateur actor himself, and when he later retired to the island
of Gozo near Malta he is reputed to have translated The Pirates
of Penzance into Gozitan. Rumours abound of other flamboyant
visitors like the architect Henry Lynch Robinson and Erroll Flynn
the film star. The playwright Stewart Parker lived in one of the
flats briefly about 1970.
Latterly the house was entirely occupied by young artists, among
them Susan Philipsz who organised an exhibition in 1998 called
Rev Todd's Full House, which assembled the work of some fifty
artists who had lived or stayed in the house up to that time.
The building was used as a location in the film Divorcing Jack
during that period. Unfortunately the flats did not meet current
fire regulations and the house was closed shortly after that.
Hearth negotiated a long lease on the property in 2000, and then
sought finance to restore the building to its former glory. The
building was unlisted because of the extent of its alterations,
but it was listed in 2002 which made an application to the Heritage
Lottery Fund possible. During the interim Hearth put in caretakers
drawn from the pool of artists interested in the building and
provided studio space for artists such as Rita Duffy and Martin
Wedge.
Work started as soon as planning permission was granted in 2004.
In addition to upgrading the services to the building the main
work involved was the reinstatement of the elevation to College
Green which had been disfigured in the conversion to flats, with
steel picture windows replacing the original round headed windows
and stone dormers. Restoration involved considerable repairs to
brickwork and stonework as the 1930s windows were in different
positions from the originals and many chimneys lacked their stone
cappings. Metal finials and the cresting at the top of the roof
were reinstated, along with the unusual barley-sugar railings,
pillars and gates. The 1930s entrance to the flats from College
Green was retained, but the old front door in Botanic Avenue which
had become a window has been reinstated as a doorway. A three-storey
bay added at the rear of the house was removed to restore the
cubical design of the building, and that permitted restoration
of the arch linking it to the former coach house. Internally,
plasterwork was restored using moulds taken from no.2 College
Green which had been part of the same development. The staircase
dado was restored using painted and grained Lincrusta, while the
flat entrance doors were grained.
Following extensive structural repairs to the outbuildings they
have now opened as a restaurant and micro-brewery. The house of
the former whiskey magnate is now linked to one of the few sources
of real ale in Belfast. And as for its Headless Dog brew? If you
look carefully at the base of the coach house you will see the
silhouette of a headless dog, a symbol of the group of artists
who were here in the 1990s: history tends to be circular, but
the history of this house is more spherical than most.
Client: Hearth Revolving
Fund
Architects: Hearth Housing Association
Quantity Surveyor: VB Evans
Structural Engineer: Brian Campbell
M&E Engineer: Building Services Design
Main Contractor: Annvale Construction Ltd, Armagh
Restored: 2004-05
Assisted by loans and grants from: Heritage Lottery Fund, the
Architectural Heritage Fund, Northern Bank and own capital.
To read about work on the project click here:
To read about the history of the building click
here:
