Book Bundle: Celebrating Bangor the City

Celebrating Bangor’s newly acquired city status, we are offering a bundle of two books which detail the architecture of the area, available now for only £30!

Bangor: An Historical Gazetteer

One of a series of Ulster Architectural Heritage Society lists and gazetteers, this extensively enlarged and updated edition describes Bangor in detail from the Custom House of 1637 to buildings of the 1990s.

Packed with anecdotes, it covers Bangor street by street and often building by building, describing not only what is there now but also tantalisingly, what has gone. It seeks to put the buildings of the present in an historic context and explores the ways in which Bangor and its environs have developed.

Neither wallowing in nostalgia nor merely listing present day buildings, this is a lively, informative and entertaining account of the architecture and social history of Bangor, Groomsport, Crawfordsburn and their environs.

Buildings of North County Down (Hard back)

This book is part of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society’s counties series.

This is a companion volume to Sir Charles Brett’s ‘Buildings of County Antrim’, published 1996; also, although less directly, to his ‘Buildings of Belfast’, first published in 1967, the year when he became first chairman of the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society. Once again it represents a personal selection, rather than an inventory, of some of the more interesting or important buildings within the northern part of the old County Down – embracing the whole of the district council areas of North Down, Ards and Castlereagh, and those parts of the District Council areas of Lisburn and Craigavon which lie within the old boundaries of the county.

Like its predecessors, the book deals with all the surviving grand houses of the county, and also those who lived in them. Antiquities, mansions, cottages, churches, public buildings, follies and memorials are all described. There is an intriguing mixture of architectural history, archaeology, local history, gossip, description, and comment. The ownership information should be of considerable interest to family historians.