Celebrating 400 Years of Ballymena: A Day of Joy with Friends and Community

On Saturday, 23rd May, Ballymena marked it's 400 year anniversary of the historic 1626 Royal Charter granted by King Charles I to the Adair family. This royal patent gave the town the rights to hold a weekly Saturday market and annual fairs, laying the foundation for Ballymena as a vibrant market town.

The event, organised by Mid and East Antrim Borough Council, brought together people from all walks of life to honour the town’s heritage and look forward to its future. Among the many groups participating were Ballymena Business Centre / Midtown Makers team. We were joined by members artists Jacque McNeill, Jennifer Davison, Andrea O'Kane and their family. Other friends and family joined us as well as Ballymena BID's Emma and Claire dressed as dinosaurs.

A brief history by Jim Stevenson:

Church Street, Ballymena – Home of Midtown Makers

A 400-year story of faith, fire‑ and fresh beginnings

1. A street that shaped a town

First mapped on the 1830s Ordnance Survey, Church Street was – and still is – the spine that links Ballymena’s oldest commercial arteries, Mill Street, Broughshane Street and Ballymoney Street. For centuries market wagons rattled over its cobbles, pilgrims crossed it on the way to church, and drapers’ bolts of linen were trundled out to the world beyond. The street earned the nickname “the nave of Ballymena” because so much of the town’s life passed along its narrow, north-south‑ axis.

2. Towers of faith: the last two of the “Seven Towers”

Ballymena’s crest proclaims, “City of the Seven Towers”, a slogan coined in the late Victorian‑ era to celebrate the landmark steeples that once ringed the skyline. Only two original towers survive – and both rise from Church Street. 

Tower	Date	Story in brief
Old Parish Church Tower	1721	The sole remnant of the church consecrated for Kirkinriola parish. When the congregation out‑grew it, the nave was dismantled but the squat basalt tower – now wrapped in ivy and surrounded by gravestones – still watches over the street.
St Patrick’s Church Tower	1855 / rebuilt 1881	Funded on land gifted by the Adair family, the Early English‑ ‑style church seated 800 worshippers. A catastrophic fire in December 1879 gutted the building, but parishioners insisted on an exact reconstruction, completed in 15 months.

Together the two steeples form a stone timeline: one marking Ballymena’s ‑18th-century‑ rise, the other its resilient 19th-century‑ spirit.

3. Commerce upstairs, cows out back – the mixed life of No. 51‑53

The double fronted premises that Midtown Makers occupies‑ have sheltered entrepreneurs since at least 1843. Valuation rolls and local directories trace a kaleidoscope of tenants:

• Wool drapers and haberdashers

• Chemist

•  Tailor

•  Shoe Shop

•  Confectioner

•  Bakery

• Tea Rooms

•  Restaurant

• Grocery merchants

• Milliner

• Stewarts Cash Stores – the name many locals still use for the building, remembered for its friendly tea‑rooms and fresh loaves

• A part‑time dental studio

Above the shop, generations of owners lived “over the‑ premises”, while the rear yard once squeezed in‑ a stable, cowhouse, piggery, turf store, laundry‑ and workshop – everyday reminders that Church Street balanced rural supply with urban demand.

4. Blast and bounce‑back: May 1979

At lunchtime on 18 May 1979 the IRA detonated a 200lb bomb in a hijacked postal van on Church Street. The blast blew in shopfronts – including Stewarts – and showered masonry across the carriageway; miraculously there were no fatalities thanks to a rapid police evacuation. Traders reopened behind plywood hoardings and “bomb‑ damaged‑ stock” sales became a badge of defiance. 

The current plate-glass façade of Midtown Makers dates from the post‑ bomb‑ restoration – a visible pledge that commerce would continue no matter what the Troubles threw at the town.

5. Midtown Makers: regeneration in action

Fast forward to 2014: Ballymena Business Centre took over the then‑ ‑vacant premises and imagined them as Midtown Makers Studio & Shop. Sixty microbusinesses – from ceramicists to chocolatiers – now share affordable retail, workshop and exhibition space, pulling craft tourists onto Church Street and seeding new footfall for neighbouring independents. The project has twice won regional awards for town‑ centre‑ regeneration. 

Midtown Makers is more than a marketplace: it is an incubator where entrepenears test ideas, where school groups learn about maker careers, where interested people can learn crafts that are no longer passed down by Grandparents and parents and where the old “shopkeeper living overhead” model is reborn as Crafters and Artists under the same roof selling handmade gifts and items that now travel all across the world, keeping skills and memories alive.

6. Today’s tapestry – old names & new energy

Walk the 300 metres from St Patrick’s tower to the Fairhill junction and you will pass: 

• Woodsides Pharmacy – still dispensing after 130 years

• Bright pink‑ Dougie’s Goodies bakery, relocated to a larger unit in 2024 to meet soaring demand for tray‑bakes 

• A clutch of long‑standing jewellers and menswear stores recorded in the 1910 Ulster Towns Directory, proof that some family firms span five generations. 

The mix of heritage brands and Gen-Z enterprises mirrors Ballymena’s wider pivots from heavy manufacturing to creative ‑micro industry‑.

7. Why Church Street still matters

• Connectivity – it links the pedestrianized Shopping Centres to out‑lying residential quarters.

• Character – basalt church towers, Victorian façades and mid-century modern shopfronts create a layered streetscape that can’t be cloned by an ‑out-of-town‑ retail park.

• Community – remembrance services, craft fairs and Christmas light switch‑-ons‑ all converge here, echoing the medieval markets held on the same ground.

Local planners now centre their Ballymena “Living Places” strategy on upgrading pavements, adding pocket parks and offering rent incentives – with Midtown Makers held up as a ‑case study‑ of how one address can catalyse a whole block.

Epilogue: stone, smoke and fresh paint

Stand at the old parish tower at dusk. Look south to see St Patrick’s silhouette, and north to Midtown Makers’ brightly lit windows. Between those bookends lies everything Ballymena has endured and achieved – Reformation ruins, Victorian optimism, the shrapnel scarred 1970s, and a 21^st‑ century renaissance driven by people who still believe a good idea can take root on a very old‑ street.