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Lisburn ( ; ) is a city in Northern Ireland. It is southwest of Belfast city centre, on the River Lagan, which forms the boundary between County Antrim and County Down. First laid out in the 17th century by English and Welsh settlers, with the arrival of French Huguenots in the 18th century, the town developed as a global centre of the linen industry.
In 2002, as part of Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee celebrations, the predominantly unionist borough was granted city status alongside the largely nationalist town of Newry. With a population of 45,370 in the 2011 Census, Lisburn was the third-largest city in Northern Ireland. In the 2016 reform of local government in Northern Ireland Lisburn was joined with the greater part of Castlereagh to form the Lisburn City and Castlereagh District.
In the records, the name Lisburn appears to supersede Lisnagarvey around 1662. One theory is that it comes from the Irish lios ('ringfort') and the Scots language burn ('stream'). Some speculate that -burn refers to the burning of the town during the Irish Rebellion of 1641, but there is evidence of earlier use. An English soldier later recalled the rebels having entered the town of Lisnagarvy at "a place called Louzy Barne". In the town's early days, there were possibly two ringforts: Lisnagarvy to the north and Lisburn to the south, and the latter may simply have been easier for the English settlers to pronounce.
In 1611 George Carew, 1st Earl of Totnes remarked: "In our travel from Dromore towards Carrickfergus, we saw in Kellultagh upon Sir Fulke Conway’s lands a house of cagework in hand and almost finished, where he intends to erect a bawn of brick in a place called Lisnagarvagh. He has built a fair timber bridge over the river of Lagan near the house." In 1622 the first impressions of Sir Fulke's brother and heir, Edward Conway, was of "a curious place ... Greater storms are not in any place nor greater serenities: foul ways, boggy ground, pleasant fields, water brooks, rivers full of fish, full of game, the people in their attire, language, fashion: barbarous. In their entertainment free and noble."
Management of the Conways' Irish estate fell largely to George Rawdon, a Yorkshire man, who laid out the streets of Lisburn as they are today: Market Square, Bridge Street, Castle Street and Bow Street. He had a manor house built on what is now Castle Gardens, and in 1623, a church on the site of the current cathedral. In 1628, King Charles I granted a charter for a weekly market, which is still held in the town every Tuesday. To populate the town, Rawdon, hostile to the Presbyterian Scots already moving into the area, brought over English people and Welsh people settlers.
In 1641 the Irish, rising in the first instance against English, and not Scottish, settlers, were driven back three times from the town. A herd four hundred head of cattle driven against the gates failed to batter them down. The town nonetheless burned. (2026). 9780717146499, Gill & Macmillan. ISBN 9780717146499 In 1649 the town was secured by forces loyal to Oliver Cromwell's English Commonwealth, routing an army of Scots Covenanters, and their Cavalier allies, in the Battle of Lisnagarvey. (1999). 9780415159029, Routledge. ISBN 9780415159029
The Presbyterians, despite their loyalty to the British Crown, upon its Restoration continued to be penalised as "dissenters" from the established Anglican church, the Church of Ireland. It was not until 1670 that they were permitted a meeting house in town, and that had to be of "perishable materials ... dark, narrow and devoid of any pretensions to art and comfort. Their support for King William (whose forces wintered in the town) and the "Protestant cause" in 1690 likewise failed to win them equal standing. Like the Roman Catholics, who had to wait another 60 years for a "Mass House", Presbyterians were discouraged from exerting their presence. The First Presbyterian Church built in 1768 was screened (until 1970) from Market Square by shops.
The town was destroyed once again in 1707: the accidental conflagration giving rise to the town's motto Ex igne resurgam --"Out of the fire I shall arise". Conway's Manor house was not restored (part of the surrounding wall and its gateway with the date 1677 engraved still stands on the south and east side of Castle Gardens). The Anglican church, designated by Charles II as Christ Church Cathedral in 1662, was rebuilt retaining the tower and the surviving galleries in the nave. The distinctive octagonal spire was added in 1804.
One of the few buildings spared in the fire of 1707 was the Friend's Meeting House. Quakers had been brought to the town in 1655 by a veteran of Cromwell's army, William Edmundson. In 1766, a prosperous linen merchant, John Hancock, endowed what is now the grammar school known as Friends' School Lisburn.
John Wesley first visited Lisburn in 1756, and thereafter he returned to preach biannually until 1789. The first Wesleyan Methodist Preaching House was established in the town in 1772.
The Huguenot retained their own place of worship, the "French Church" in Castle Street, until 1820. The last of its pastors, Saumarez Dubourdieu, was 56 years Master of the Classical School of the Bow Street. His students subscribed to his memorial and bust on the south interior of the cathedral.
Large scale manufacture began in 1764 when William Coulson established his first linen looms close by is now the Union Bridge. His mill supplied damask to the royal courts of Europe and, in the early nineteenth century, was to draw celebrity visitors, among them Grand Duke Michael of Russia, Gustaf V, Louis Napoléon Lannes duc de Montebello, the Duke of Wellington and Lord John Russell.
To carry the town's new trade, construction of the Belfast-Lisburn section of the Lagan Canal began in 1756. Despite problems of low water levels during the summer, the canal (extended in 1794 to Lough Neagh) continued to carry bulk cargoes until 1958.
In 1784, the Scotsman John Barbour began spinning linen thread, and in 1831 his son William moved production to what had originally been Crommelin's Bleach Green at Hilden. By the end of the century Barbour's Linen Thread Company was the largest mill of its kind in the world employing about 2000 people to work 30,000 spindles and 8,000 twisting machines. The company had built a model village for the workers, with 350 houses, two schools, a community hall, children's playground and a village sports ground.
The Volunteer militia movement, formed in response to the defence emergency caused by French intervention in the American War of Independence, served the town's merchants and tradesmen as an opportunity to protest (with their kindred in the American colonies) the restrictive Navigation Acts and to insist on the independence of the Irish Parliament in Dublin. In 1783 William Todd Jones, a captain of the Lisburn Fusilier Corps of Volunteers, took this patriot programme (approved at a convention in Dungannon) a step further. He successfully challenged the parliamentary nominees of the town and district's principal landlord, the Hertfords, on a platform of a representative reform to include votes for Catholics.
In the wake of the French Revolution the cause of religious equality and representative government for Ireland was taken up in a still less compromising form by the Society of United Irishmen. The society won support of working men in the town, and of its leading Catholic family, the Teelings of Chapel Hill, wealthy linen manufacturers. Bartholomew Teeling (destined to hang) and his brother Charles, were an important connection between the largely Presbyterian "United men" and Catholic Defenders in rural areas. It is likely, however, that the greater strength in the district was the fraternal Orange Order, newly formed in defence of the [Protestant Ascendancy]]. In 1797 the Order paraded 3,000 loyalists in the town before the British commander General Lake.
The neighbouring military camp at Blaris, ensured that when in 1798 the United Irishmen, decided upon insurrection, there could be no rebel demonstration in the town. Blaris supplied troops that helped ensure defeat for the forces of the "Republic" to the north of the town at the Battle of Antrim on June 7, and to the south at the Battle of Ballynahinch on June 12 where the "Croppy" had been under the command of the Lisburn linen draper, Henry Munro. For over a month, the severed heads of Munro and three of his lieutenants were displayed on pikes, one on each corner of the Market House.
To the visitors the town still appeared in 1840 to consist "principally of one long street" (Bow Street) at the Market Square end of which stood the cathedral. An "interesting and picturesque church", it contained "two very remarkable monuments". One is of "the great and good Jeremy Taylor" (1613–1667), sometime Bishop of Down and Conor (reputed "Shakespeare of the Divines" and former chaplain to Charles I). The other is to the memory of Lieutenant William Dobbs killed in the capture of his vessel, HMS Drake, by the American privateer John Paul Jones (an engagement in Belfast Lough in 1778 that spurred formation of the Volunteer movement).
The Halls would have been able to proceed the eight miles to Belfast on the newly completed Ulster Railway line. The line from Belfast was continued to Portadown and, with the completion of the Boyne Viaduct, connected with Dublin in 1855. A junction out of Lisburn at Knockmore, established further service to Banbridge and Newcastle and to Antrim and Derry. Lisburn's present railway station, built for the Great Northern Railway Company, dates from 1878.
The new transportation links encouraged further industrial growth. In 1889, newspapers reported a rival to Barbour's factory: a "splendid new mill" by Robert Stewart & Son to employ over a thousand hands, with the novelty of electric lighting and "toilets on every floor".
As had other Protestant-majority districts, Lisburn quickly reconciled to the union with Great Britain that followed the 1798 rebellion. Support for the Union, seen both as a guarantee of free trade and as security against Catholic-majority rule, spurred the further growth in the town of the Orange Order and helped return Hertford-approved Conservative candidates to the Westminster parliament. The political loyalty of tenants (who were to enjoy a secret ballot only from 1871) was further secured by the relative beneficence of the 3rd Marquess of Hertford. Despite a reputation of being "the most thoroughgoing rogue in the kingdom" and spending almost all of his life on the continent, when cholera struck in 1832 Francis Seymour-Conway (1777–1842) erected a hospital and distributed medicines, blankets, clothing and other necessities throughout the estate.
Wallace (1818–1890) was created baronet in 1871 and was the Conservative and Unionist Member of Parliament (MP) for Lisburn from 1873 to 1885 (when Lisburn was incorporated into the new South Antrim constituency). His bequests to the people of Lisburn included Wallace Park, grounds for the Intermediate and University School (later renamed in his honour, Wallace High School), and a remodelling of the Market House. (The large residence he built on Castle Street, but never occupied, today houses offices of the South Eastern Regional College). In 1872 he donated 50 Wallace fountain (cast from a sculpture of Charles-Auguste Lebourg), to Paris (on whose humanitarian relief during the German siege of 1870–1871 he had already spent a considerable fortune)Horne, Alastair (1965) The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870–71, pgs 167–168. Penguin Books, London. and five to Lisburn where one is still to be found in Castle Gardens and another in Wallace Park. The town responded with a memorial to Wallace in Castle Gardens.
in Castle Street]]In 1852, Lord Hertford's agent, the Reverend James Stannus, the Rector of Lisburn Cathedral, had occasion to write to him suggesting a general increase in rents as punishment for the tenants both for an attack on his person and for their defiance in voting for a dissident Conservative, a free-trade "Peelite". The following year the tenants sent a delegation to Hertford in Paris in a vain protest. In 1872, charges of "high-handed management of the estate" (the arbitrary fining and eviction of tenants, interference in elections, and discrimination against non-Anglicans) prompted Stannus's son and successor to sue the Belfast paper, the Northern Whig for defamation. The Dublin jury found for the plaintiff only under pressure from the judge, fixing the damages at £100.
Together with failing agricultural prices, a willingness even of Orangemen to join the Irish National Land League helped turn the tables: in the 1880s agents were proposing to appease tenant with rent reductions. Under the later marquesses, and as their legal powers to dictate terms diminished, tenant-landlord relations improved.
By the new century the Irish Land Acts had effectively retired the great proprietors and their agents from the scene. In a departing gesture, in 1901, Sir John Murray Scott, heir of Lady Wallace, gave the Market House with its Assembly Rooms to Lisburn Urban District Council, for "the benefit of the inhabitants of the town". The Hertford Rent Office in Castle Street was closed in 1901 and became Lisburn Town Hall.
Lisburn and neighbouring communities raised three battalions of the UVF, the South Antrim Volunteers. They were a token of the determination of local people (in the words of Ulster Covenant "to stand by one another in defending for ourselves and our children our position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland". The United Kingdom declaration of war upon Germany (August 3), paused resolution of the Home Rule Crisis, and many of Lisburn's Volunteers would go on to serve with the 36th (Ulster) Division.
On July 12, 1916, for the first time since 1797 there was no Orange demonstration of any kind to celebrate the Williamite victory at the Boyne. The customary midnight drumming parade was abandoned, and no arches or flags were displayed. Most of the mills and factories were closed. The town responded to the news that on the first day of Somme offensive, July 1, the Ulster Division had lost 5,000 men wounded, 2,069 killed.
Over the next three days and nights Protestant Ulster loyalism crowds looted and burned practically every Catholic business in the town, and attacked Catholic homes.Lawlor, pp.115–121 There is evidence that Ulster Volunteers had helped organise the burnings. Rioters attacked firemen who tried to save Catholic property,Lawlor, p.137 and lorries of British soldiers sent to help the police. Brigadier-General William Pain (a former Ulster Volunteer leader) had troops guard the Catholic church and convent, but failed to take strong action to quell rioting elsewhere. The parochial house was looted, burnt out and daubed with sectarian slogans.Lawlor, p.143 Some Catholics were severely beaten, and a Catholic pub owner later died of gunshot wounds. A charred body was found in the ruins of a factory.Lawlor, p.126
Lisburn was likened to "a bombarded town in France" during the war. The Swanzy Riots, 1920 . Lisburn Museum. About 1,000 people, a third of the town's Catholics, fled Lisburn. Many were forced to take the mountain road to Belfast where troops were already blocking off streets with barbed wire cordons, a prelude to still greater violence. Fires soon raged across Belfast and in the next few days thirty people were killed in the city (see Belfast Pogrom). As a result of the violence, Lisburn was the first town to recruit the special constables who went on to become the Ulster Special Constabulary. In October, about thirty special constables faced charges for involvement in the "Swanzy riots".Lawlor, pp.171–176 The last Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, admitted that "some hundred special constables in Lisburn threatened to resign" in protest. Charges were not pursued.
On the day that a 700-year English presence in the south of Ireland ended with the formal hand over of Dublin Castle to the government of the Irish Free State, 16 January 1922, Lisburn celebrated the centenary of the local "hero of the Indian Mutiny", John Nicholson (1822–1857). Under a marble relief of his final assault on Delhi's Kashmir Gate, a memorial in the Cathedral credited Nicholson with dealing a "death blow to the greatest danger that ever threatened the British Empire". For James Craig, now the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, and for other dignitaries speaking at the unveiling of a new statue in Market Square, the East India Company Brigadier (depicted with both sword and gun in hand) was "a symbol of the defence of Empire in Ireland as well as India.
In April the following year crowds gathered again to dedicate the Victory Memorial in Castle Gardens. Had he not been assassinated by the IRA on his London doorstep, it would have been unveiled by Sir Henry Wilson, former Chief of the Imperial General Staff and MP for North Down.
The Second World War struck close to Lisburn with the Belfast Blitz of April and May 1941. The town and the surrounding area was flooded by thousands of evacuees all of whom, as one member of the Lisburn Women's Voluntary Service recalled, had to be "fed, housed, deloused, marshalled, bathed, clothed, pacified and brought back to normal".
In the post-war decades the demand for linen declined (precipitously after World War Two) in response to new textiles and changing fashion. With a workforce reduced to just 85, the Barbour mill in Hilden finally closed in 2006.
The population of Lisburn, which in 1951 was still just 15,000, nonetheless continued to grow. In part this was a consequence of the expansion of the town boundary lines in 1973, and of a dramatic increase in public authority housing with overspill from Belfast. As stock improved, the town retained few examples of the terraced housing built by the mill owners in the nineteenth century. Development did see the loss of some historic landmarks: the Victorian Court House in Railway Street, the Sacred Heart of Mary Grammar School in Castle Street and, in Linenhall Street, the Independent Order of Good Templars hall and the weaving factory of William Coulson.
The opening of the M1 motorway in 1962 further integrated Lisburn into the greater Belfast commercial and residential area. The Motorway Archive – M1 (Northern Ireland)
In 1989 the new edge-of-town Sprucefield retail park opened. The centre was virtually destroyed in January 1991 in a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) incendiary attack. Marks and Spencer, the principal anchor was spared, but the three other major stores were destroyed.
On what was once known (because of the production of sulphuric acid bleach) as Vitriol Island in the middle of the River Lagan, the last remnants of the Island Spinning Company were demolished in the early 1990s. The Lagan Valley Island Complex was officially opened by Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, in November 2001.
A borough since 1973, Lisburn was granted city status in 2002 as part of Elizabeth II's Golden jubilee celebrations." City Status conferred on Lisburn and Newry ", Northern Ireland Office, 14 May 2002. Retrieved 4 March 2008.
In early 1970 the Thiepval Barracks became home to 39 Infantry Brigade and provided the headquarters for the locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment. From August 1969, the Brigade, as 39 Airportable Brigade, was involved in The Troubles in Northern Ireland, eventually taking on responsibility, under HQ Northern Ireland, for an area including Belfast and the eastern side of the province, but excluding the South Armagh border region. From September 1970, it was commanded by (then) Brigadier Frank Kitson. Bloody Sunday Inquiry website—Statement of General Sir Frank Kitson. Retrieved 28 May 2008.
In Lisburn's last casualties of the conflict, a soldier was killed and 31 people were injured when the(IRA) exploded two car bombs in the barracks on October 7, 1996.
The barracks remain home to 38th (Irish) Brigade.
After receiving city status in 2008, in the 2016 reform of local government in Northern Ireland Lisburn was combined with residential areas of broadly similar social and political complexion bordering Belfast to the south and east. The fusion produced Lisburn City and Castlereagh District. According to measures devised by the Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency, the district ranked among the least socially and economically deprived in the province.
In the third election to new 40-seat Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council, in May 2023, the twelve seats representing Lisburn returned a reduced unionist majority: four seats for the DUP (a loss of one) and two for the UUP (a loss of two) and an independent unionist. The cross-community Alliance Party held gained one to hold three; the moderate nationalist SDLP retained a seat, and for the first time Lisburn returned a Sinn Féin councillor. Following the election, in June 2023 Gary McCleave, who was re-elected to represent the Killultagh DEA became "the first ever Sinn Féin councillor to hold a mayoral position in Lisburn and Castlereagh City Council": he was named deputy mayor.
Following the decision of the sitting DUP MP and party leader, Jeffrey Donaldson, not to stand in the 2024 United Kingdom general election, Lisburn's Lagan Valley constituency returned for the first time a non-unionist, a woman, and a person from a Catholic community background, the Alliance Party's Sorcha Eastwood.
In elections for the Westminster Parliament the city falls mainly into the Lagan Valley constituency.
Two District Electoral Areas cover the city and surrounding areas. Lisburn North (Derriaghy, Harmony Hill, Hilden, Lambeg, Magheralave, Wallace Park) and Lisburn South (Ballymacash, Ballymacoss, Knockmore, Lagan Valley, Lisnagarvey, Old Warren). In the 2023 local elections the following were elected to represent the two DEAs:
The headquarters of the British Army in Northern Ireland at Thiepval Barracks and the headquarters of the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service are located in the city.
On Census Day, in Lisburn City Settlement, considering the population aged 3 years old and over:
The first Lisburn school which did not ask pupils whether they attended church, chapel or meeting was that founded on the Dublin Road by John Crossley in 1810. Known then as the Male Free School, it was the first free school in Ulster to be based on the Bell and Lancaster monitorial system.
A school for poor children, established by Jane Hawkshaw in 1821 with the support of the 3rd marquess, taught no catechism and made no attempt at religious instruction. It adopted that principle that "while so great diversity prevails on this subject, it is best to separate religion from the instructing in reading, writing, arithmetic and sewing". Religious instruction was to be left to "the parents, with the assistance of their respective teachers". It is a principle that the government tried, but in the face of church opposition failed, to realise in its original 1830 plans for an Irish system of National Schools.
Another exception to control by the church education authorities was Hilden School, established under mill management by William Barbour in 1829.
Today, Fort Hill Primary and Fort Hill College make a conscious effort to surmount principal sectarian divide in the town through a system of "integrated education". Children from Catholic and Protestant homes in Lisburn are otherwise taught, with limited exception, separately on a pattern that, by the mid-nineteenth century, had been established throughout Ireland.
Lisburn Central Primary School () is an Eco-Schools and Preschool. The school was established in 1934 when the first Lisburn Presbyterian Church School and the Christ Church, Church of Ireland Nicholson School united to form one school Lisburn Central was awarded a Green Flag award in 2023 for its publicly accessible park and open spaces.
In 2012, Scoil na Fuiseoige, the first Irish language-medium primary school, serving the Lisburn area, opened in Twinbrook.
South Eastern Regional College is a successor to the Lisburn Technical Institute established in 1914. On its enlarged Castle Street campus, it offers courses and apprenticeships in Bio-Sciences, Computing, Electronic Engineering, Manufacturing and Mechanical Engineering, Media, Music, Photography, Sport and Recreation, Travel and Tourism, Construction, Animal Management, Creative Industries and Performing Arts.
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The principal Roman Catholic Church in Lisburn is St Patrick's on Chapel Hill dedicated in 1900. For Presbyterians the senior congregation remains that of the First Presbyterian Church, off Market Square, built in 1768, and enlarged and remodelled in 1873 and 1970. For the Methodists, it is the Seymour Street Church opened on ground donated by Sir Richard Wallace in 1875.
The city has a network of local buses, serving the local housing developments and amenities. These are operated by Ulsterbus.
A new "Buscentre", provided by the regional public transport provider Translink, opened on 30 June 2008 at the corner of Smithfield Street and the Hillsborough Road. It replaced the shelters that formerly stood in Smithfield Square.
County Antrim:
County Down:
Averaged over the period 1971–2000 the warmest day of the year at Hillsborough will reach , although 9 out of 10 years should record a temperature of or above.
Averaged over the same period, the coldest night of the year typically falls to and on 37 nights air frost was observed.
Typically annual rainfall falls just short of 900 mm, with at least 1 mm falling on 154 days of the year.
Water can be supplied from Dams and nearby rivers thanks to the rainfall and mountains. In the 19th Century, Duncan's Dam provided the town with water and now serves as a free public park.
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