58. The Corner House

From time to time, you’ll come across a pub that seems to synthesise the character, history and renown of its broader social context. Lurgan was once the centre of the linen industry, an industrial town with the Johnson and Allen linen mill at its heart, Today, the linen factory and its importance for the life and people of the town is still more than just a scrap of history. The business seems to have ingrained itself into the nature and quality of the area, to have become part of the essence of the place long after it ceased to become commercially active.

Go out of the town a little to the Corner House at Aghacommon, and you’ll see for yourself how this once-thriving industry has left a sort of legacy in the memory of the people. Here you can see a kind of museum created in homage to the buildings, workers and materials of the linen process, a process which is articulated in a wall display that goes from raw flax right through to the finest linen products. There’s a sample of dried flax, a photo Of scutching flax, and so on, down to the exquisite final linen showpiece.

Look around and the whole thing has been chronicled.
From an 1898 photograph of Johnson and Allen staff to a series of pictures of the very boilers used in the factory, in Lurgan’s Victoria Street. You won’t find a better guide than George, the bar manager, to answer any of your questions or fill in some of the finer details.

You may well need his assistance because quite apart from the linen exhibition, this is a bar of odds and ends, clustered especially around the bar area. Stone jars, a harp, a fiddle, a stuffed white hare in a glass case, a spinning wheel, an organ in perfect working order, a blunderbuss, a cobbler’s instruments, swords and pistols were some of the ones we were able to itemise, but there are many others too obscure for our powers of classification.

The Corner House also parades many fine paintings, several by local artist Colm King, and among his works are a fine colour painting of the pub itself, a portrait of local man Charles Tighe, now deceased, with dog and pint of stout, and an impressive mural of an old man sitting “in hearthside ease” in his cottage.

Those of you who remember the Bannfoot ferry, now sadly discontinued, can recall it clearly, courtesy of a large colour painting on the wall, just above the cabinet of stuffed wildfowl. The greatest wonder of all, though, and unique in our experience, is to be seen in the spacious function room.
It’s a massive large-tiled clay mosaic depicting the Corner House.

It was made by a local artist using the clay dug out from the function room’s foundations. This remarkable work is about ten feet by six feet, and unlike anything we have ever seen in any other pub.
Upstairs you can visit the grill and lounge bar, or the attractive restaurant with its valuable collection of antique furniture . the sideboard and display cabinet of fine china and glassware are particularly worth your attention, and you’ll enjoy as well the painting of a game of marbles being played in Arthur Street of the Lurgan of old.

The Corner House in Aghacommon has now run by Marie McAlinden, since the passing of her husband, Harry. It used to be called McGreevy’s Corner after former owners and has seen service as a filling station, a shop and a post office.

It’s hard to believe that just as recently as the mid-seventies, it only opened once a year to keep the licence, when you see it today, bustling, busy and flying the flag of the past, present and future.