Portadown

Victorian snugs and places to eat

McConville's Bar on West Street has ten snugs. Each is a tiny partitioned booth with a fixed table and a bell-push for ordering, arranged around the perimeter of a room that has barely changed since the 1890s. The moulded plaster ceilings, the etched glass and the tiled floor are all original, and the woodwork is said to have been copied from the panelling used on the Titanic. CAMRA lists it as a nationally important historic interior. It was first licensed in 1861 as the Mandeville Arms Hotel, took the McConville name from the family who ran it from 1865, and had a £300,000 refurbishment before reopening in 2019. Armagh I calls it "one of Northern Ireland's oldest and most treasured bars."

The food isn't really the point at McConville's — you go for the room and the pint. For a proper meal there's Sally McNally's, which has grown from a two-roomed pub into a sprawling restaurant of nooks and sofas doing dinner, coffee, and everything between. Bennetts does bar food and dining as well.

The Bann, the canal and food to take home

Portadown sits on the River Bann in flat north Armagh, near the southern shore of Lough Neagh, about 24 miles from Belfast. The Bann is the town's defining feature. The Bann Boulevard, a wide tarmac riverside path, starts behind The Meadows Shopping Centre and runs to Whitecoat Bridge; cross there and you can carry on the towpath to Knock Bridge and back. That towpath is the start of the Newry Canal Way, one of the longest traffic-free routes in Northern Ireland — roughly 20 miles of flat walking and cycling south through Scarva and Poyntzpass to Newry. The canal it follows was completed in 1741, the first summit-level canal built in the British Isles, nearly thirty years before the Bridgewater.

For food to take home, T. Knox & Sons on West Street is an award-winning butcher, deli and bakery under one roof. The Portadown Farmers Market runs Fridays and Saturdays at Millennium Court, with fresh fish on Fridays only. Irwin's Bakery, founded here in 1912, is Northern Ireland's largest independent bakery and the source of the Nutty Krust loaf, which "revolutionised the bread market in Northern Ireland" in the 1960s and was once voted the province's favourite product.

Bells and the hub of the North

St Mark's Church, blackstone with sandstone dressings, was consecrated in 1826 and is marking its bicentenary. Its old tower was pulled down in 1928 and replaced with a taller one as a war memorial, hung with a carillon of fifteen bells.

The town earned the nickname "the hub of the North" from its railway junction, which once sent lines to Belfast, Dublin, Armagh and Derry. The station is still a stop on the cross-border Enterprise to Dublin, with half-hourly trains to Belfast, and it sits just off the M1.

Michael Obins' park legacy

People's Park on Park Road pairs Victorian landscaping with a pirate-ship climbing frame and a zip line. It was once part of Michael Obins' estate — the same Obins who set up the town's linen market in 1762 and effectively started the place growing.