In August 1943, Portrush Urban District Council appointed Charles Aliaga Kelly — a fully qualified architect and town planner — as the town’s first Town Planner, on £450 a year. It made Portrush the first council in Northern Ireland to appoint one, acting on instruction from the Ministry of Home Affairs, a year ahead of any other council in the country. His brief: produce a Development Plan for what postwar Portrush should become.
A lost report, rediscovered
Kelly delivered a 65-page report with 81 recommendations. For decades, only a photocopy of the text survived in the Portrush Heritage Group’s records — the maps and sketches that gave the proposals their shape were untraceable, until local resident Kerry Gregg turned out to have his own copy, illustrations included. What follows is drawn directly from that report, in Kelly’s own words where quoted.
What Kelly actually proposed
An open-air theatre in the old dock. By the 1940s Portrush’s original harbour, the old dock, had fallen out of use — its entrance blocked by an unsafe, seldom-used railway bridge. Kelly’s report put it plainly: “The old dock, which was the original harbour for Portrush, is now useless.” His proposal: remove the bridge, fill the dock to ground level, and turn the resulting half-acre — south-facing and sheltered from all but southerly and south-westerly winds — into an open-air theatre, with seating around a stage for musical recitals and variety shows on summer evenings.
Two new ways up Ramore Head. Kelly wanted proper access to the plateau on the west side of Ramore Head’s cliffs: a stairway from the look-out point, a second near the quarry, and 350 yards of flat path linking them along the top — or, as an alternative to one of the stairways, a short tunnel cut through the rock from the quarry itself. He noted the cliffs there face south-west and stay warm even on cool days, sheltered from the worst of the wind.
A low-level harbour promenade. A 20-foot-wide promenade along the harbour’s north-east side, running from the old dock’s western edge to the beach slip in the harbour’s east corner, with a small pier reaching into deeper water so larger boats could use it too.
A serious swimming pool complex behind the South Pier. This was Kelly’s most ambitious idea by some distance — two pools, both heated, filtered and continuously sterilised seawater. An indoor pool “of full international dimensions” with a shallow end for children; alongside it, a large open-air pool 180 feet by 120 feet, ranging from 1 to 15 feet deep under the diving boards, fully enclosed and roofed so bathing could continue “at all times of the day or night, or year.” A glass- walled underwater viewing passage would run beneath the water, floodlit at night, doubling as a small aquarium of local fish. Overhanging the whole complex, a terrace opening onto a café- restaurant and dance hall. For anyone who preferred the open sea, a groyne and floating boom offshore were designed to keep swimmers safe without keeping them penned in.
Everything else
The report didn’t stop there — Kelly’s magazine coverage promises further instalments covering proposals for a Quarry Coal Storage and Recreational Building, a South Pierhead Pavilion, breakwaters at Portscaddan and Reviggerly Point, a Quarry Court housing development, a harbour commercial area, Main Street widening, a Causeway tram terminus, a paddling pool, a camera obscura on Ramore Head, new recreation grounds, a shopping centre, a new railway station and road layout, an industrial area, and an upper promenade with its own harbour railway.
None of it happened — not the theatre, not the pools, not the tunnel through the quarry. The 1944 council that commissioned it (Chairman A. Stewart, Vice-Chairman T. McCandless, and councillors R.B. Adams, T.A. Baxter, W.H. Bruce, H. Carson, R.T. Dunseath, S. Fawcett, J. Fox, W.R. Knox, J. Logan, P.G. Ross, J.H. Seery and S. Stanfield, with Town Clerk W.I. Cunningham and Town Surveyor A.J. Clarke) never saw any of it built. What’s left is Kelly’s report itself — a genuinely ambitious, occasionally eccentric vision of Portrush as a serious purpose-built seaside resort, on a scale the town never quite reached.
Sources
Sourced from “The Portrush That Might Have Been” by John McNally, published in Discover Portrush Magazine, drawing on Charles Aliaga Kelly’s 1943–44 Portrush Preliminary Planning Proposals report.