THROUGH THE ARCHIVES: Correspondent laments state of the Brown Linen Hall

“In one of the busiest streets of a busy town, it is rather odd to find a place resembling, in all outward respects, a neglected graveyard,” wrote a correspondent in the News Letter on this day in 1872.

What had driven him to put pen to paper?

It was the state of the Brown Linen Hall, established in 1773, and standing in Donegall Street.

Had any visitor to the Belfast dropped into the Brown Hall, they wrote, they would be much disappointed.

What they would find, they added, was “a quadrangle, open to all the winds of heaven, not only having no hall to justify its title, but no shelter, with the single exception of a tumble-down piazza resembling nothing so much as a cloister of a ruined monastery”.

Could it not be used for a linen exchange, asked the correspondent? In their opinion such an idea was perfectly plausible.

They wrote: “It was practically an exchange in the infancy of the trade, and this is certainly an important reason for adapting it to the requirements of the trade in its maturity. The Commerical News-room is used for this purpose now. Everyone knows that as such it is both inconvenient and inadequate.”

The correspondent concluded that something had to be done to bring the Brown Linen Hall back into use, they wrote: “But, whatever the purpose to which it might be applied, something should be done to rescue such a fine central site from its present degradation.”