Ark Housing confirms 131 apartments at historic Tillie & Henderson site moving ahead in Derry

The housing association says the long vacant site at Carlisle Circus will soon be revitalised as a 131 unit Housing for All scheme.

Ark has listed the Tillie & Henderson scheme among a range of projects it intends rolling out in the North in 2025 and 2026.

It describes it as ‘a new development on the historic shirt factory site, offering modern city living with superb views’.

"Tillie & Henderson will also be a Housing For All scheme, scheduled for completion in 2027 with an astounding 131 units,” said the provider.

Housing For All schemes, it explains, are ‘inclusive and open to everyone, regardless of race, religion, or community background’ and that ‘homes within these schemes are allocated through the common waiting list, ensuring a balanced and diverse community’.

The development follows proposals, originally submitted by PS Projects in 2021, for the erection of 131 apartments across three distinct blocks, Abercorn (64 units), Tillie’s (32 units) and Henderson (35).

A number of amendments have been made to the planning application in the intervening four years.

Tillie & Henderson had lain vacant for many years. The historic shirt factory that once stood there was demolished after a fire in 2003.

Karl Marx, in his foundational communist text ‘Das Kapital’, references the Derry factory in a critique of the exploitation of cheap labour by ‘modern’ manufacturers.

Marx referred to the exploitation of outworkers who supplied Tillie’s from their homes across Donegal, Derry and Tyrone.

"Besides the factory operatives, the manufacturing workmen and the handicraftsman, whom it concentrates in large masses at one spot, and directly commands, capital also sets in motion, by means, of invisible threads, another army; that of the workers in the domestic industries, who dwell in the large towns and are also scattered over the face of the country.

"An example: The shirt factory of Messrs. Tillie [sic] at Londonderry, which employs 1,000 operatives in the factory itself, and 9,000 people spread up and down the country and working in their own houses.

“The exploitation of cheap and immature labour-power is carried out in a more shameless manner in modern Manufacture than in the factory proper,” he wrote.