1990:004 - BELFAST: Winetavern Street, Antrim

A small excavation was carried out following the chance discovery of clay tobacco pipe fragments during roadworks. The site was a strip of land over 30m long by 10m wide formerly occupied by shops, demolished to enlarge access to a major development on the south. Three trenches were opened and large numbers of clay pipe fragments were found throughout a variety of contexts, including soil deposits, structural debris and the backfilled trenches of 20th-century building foundations.

Twenty-three pipe bowl types were identified, from simple, plain bowls, through name-stamped types (e.g., the ‘Citizen’, ‘Northern’, ‘Cavehill’, ‘Ben Nevis’) to elaborately decorated types bearing floral designs, wheatsheaves, crossed compasses, plum-bobs, etc., which suggest manufacture for masonic or Orange consumers. Two types, one bearing a ‘Home Rule’ slogan (first Home Rule Bill 1886), the other ‘Gladstone’ (prime minister 1868-1894), indicate a late 19th-century date for the pipes’ manufacture. Others were stamped ‘Ulster Pipe Works’, ‘UPW’ and ‘Belfast’.

Associated artefacts included pipe stems squashed while unfired, fired stems gathered as a bundle within a handful of pipe clay, saggar fragments, spalls of fired clay, and pipe fragments embedded within slag.

Winetavern Street was once famous for its clay pipes, being known locally as ‘Pipe Lane’. However, research to date, and interviews with an 83-year old member of the Hamilton/Cunningham families (who were the major pipe makers, and to whom the ‘Ulster Pipe Works’ must presumably be attached), suggested that this fame rested solely on the street’s retail business, and that manufacture took place elsewhere in Belfast.

Conclusive proof of manufacture in situ (i.e., a kiln bearing a charge of pipes) is absent. Nevertheless, unless the wasters and by-products of firing were transported to Winetavern Street, the conclusion that pipe-making did indeed take place there is hard to avoid. One (plain) set of 1-lamilton pipe moulds survives in the Ulster Museum; the excavated pipes add considerably to the range of Belfast-provenanced clay pipes known.