A White Linen Hall for Newry or Belfast?

Abstract

The prodigious growth of the industrialised linen industry associated with nineteenth-century Belfast developed from an earlier framework of eighteenth-century domestic production. This study outlines the vigorous competition in the 1780s between the linen drapers of Newry and Belfast to establish White Linen Halls where they sold the linen they had bought from domestic weavers in local linen markets. Each town offered specific advantages; however, the industry was transformed in the 1820s with the introduction of mechanised ‘wet’ spinning in Belfast and the commercial competition between the two White Linen Halls abated, leaving only the name as testimony to their once important role.