Back from the brink

Ormiston House, Belfast, Northern Ireland After the police moved out in 1995, Ormiston was abandoned, its grounds reduced to a mess of razor wire and overgrown sycamores. Christopher Stocks applauds a remarkable renaissance

- Christopher Stocks

BELFAST may have, for many, melancholy associations with RMS Titanic and The Troubles, but for much of its modern history it was a money-making town. In the 19th century, it was the centre of global linen production and had the biggest shipyard in the world, Harland and Wolff, employing 35,000 men. Large fortunes were created and its captains of industry built fine houses for themselves. As were many of the city’s most successful businessmen, James Combe was a Scot, who moved to Belfast in 1845 and opened a foundry off the Falls Road, making equipment for the rapidly expanding railways and inventing a flax-carding machine.

By 1866, he was rich enough to commission Scotland’s leading architect, David Bryce, to design a large house for him on a 62-acre estate near the city’s eastern edge. Named after the Scottish village in which Combe was born, Ormiston House is in an architectural style that might be called Belfast Baronial, with a central three-storey tower house flanked by two-storey wings on either side, all faced in imported Giffnock sandstone.

A few years after Combe’s death in 1875, the house was acquired by Sir Edward Harland of Harland & Wolff, followed 10 years later by Harland’s business partner, William Pirrie, who became Mayor of Belfast in 1896 —although he’s best-remembered today for leading the design of RMS Titanic.

Pirrie spent most of his time at his London house in Belgrave Square or at Witley Park in Surrey, but Ormiston provided a perfect venue for corporate and corporation entertainment, as well as a grace-and-favour home for company directors. A ballroom was built in the grounds and the entrance drive illuminated by ornate gas lamps (which were installed at the city’s expense, even as the surrounding streets remained unlit).