Homes evacuated after bricks fall from city centre building

A street photo showing a row of terraced Georgian-style buildings. A pile of bricks lie on the pavement below the building in the middle of the photo. Cars are parked on either side of the bricks. PSNI

Police released a photo showing a pile of bricks on the pavement below a red-bricked building on Pump Street

Eimear Flanagan
BBC News NI

A number of homes have been evacuated in Londonderry city centre due to concerns over an unsafe building, police have said.

A photo posted on the PSNI's Derry City and Strabane Facebook page shows a gap in a terraced building on Pump Street and a pile of bricks on the pavement below.

Pump Street has been closed as a result and cordons have been put in place at its junctions with Ferryquay Street and London Street.

A police spokeswoman said the road is likely to be closed for some time.

A wider view of terraced buildings on Pump Street in Derry. There is a gap between two second-storey windows at the front of a red-bricked building in the middle of the photo. There is a pile of red bricks on the pavement below. PSNI

The photo shows a gap between two second-storey windows at the front of the building

Derry City and Strabane Council has said Bishop Street community centre is available to any residents who have been affected by the evacuation.

Listed building on 'at risk' register

The damaged property is a listed building which dates back to the 19th Century and now forms part of a complex of protected structures on Pump Street.

The four-storey Georgian-era building was constructed in the early 1800s and once housed the offices of the Londonderry Sentinel newspaper.

For years, it sat next door to the oldest surviving building in Pump Street - the King's Arms Hotel.

The Catholic Church bought the adjacent hotel in 1840 and during the famine an order of nuns - the Sisters of Mercy - were asked to establish a convent at the site.

By 1890, the nuns were expanding their vocation in the city and so they acquired the former newspaper office building and incorporated it into their convent site.

The former Convent of Mercy in Pump Street pictured in 2007. The photo shows a row of red-brick Georgian terraced buildings with two green front doors. The building on the left is a three storey, seven bay former hotel building and on the right is a four-storey, four bay former newspaper office, with a basement. Ulster Architectural Heritage Society

Number 16 Pump Street (right) was a commercial building which became part of the convent next door in the late 19th Century

In the late 1970s, the convent became part of an architectural conservation area and in 1979 the complex was listed as a grade B protected building.

The Sisters of Mercy left the Pump Street site in 2005 and a few years later the buildings were briefly used as an antique and curiosity shop.

However, the former convent complex is now on the Department of Communities "Heritage at Risk" register which assesses the vulnerability of historic structures.

The listing stated that the site was in "very poor" condition and its level of risk was assessed as "critical".

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