Lisburn: The Town and its People, 1873-1973.
Author: MACKEY, Brian.
Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000. x, 165 pages. Illustrated. Paperback.
Industrious, friendly and resilient, Lisburn has a character all of its own. Founded in the early seventeenth century as an estate town, it has thrived as an agricultural and linen market town and today still attracts shoppers from near and far to its weekly market every Tuesday. Lisburn played a significant part in the origins and development of the Irish linen industry. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries its hand-woven linen damask graced the tables of Europe’s royalty and aristocracy and, after industrialisation, its mills became the largest producers of linen thread in the world. It is also a town with a strong military tradition, with the army having its Northern Ireland headquarters there since the outbreak of the Second World War.
Thanks to generations of both local and visiting photographers, the vitality of Lisburn and its people has been captured on camera since the mid-Victorian era. This handsome new book, published in partnership with Lisburn Borough Council’s multi-award-winning Irish Linen Centre and Lisburn Museum, presents the best photographs of the town in the period from the first visit of its philanthropic new landlord, Sir Richard Wallace, in 1873, to the demise of the town’s old Borough Council in 1973.
Accompanied by informative, lively captions and a historic overview, these fascinating images show Lisburn and its people at work and play throughout a hundred years of extraordinary change.
ISBN: 0856406899
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