From thread mill to shopping mall
Bow Street is one of Lisburn's oldest shopping streets, and the city it runs through was built on linen. For the best part of two centuries Lisburn sat at the heart of Ireland's linen trade — mills, weaving and thread works shaped whole districts of the town, and the story is told properly at the Irish Linen Centre & Lisburn Museum, a few minutes' walk from the mall's front door in Market Square.
The mall itself stands on a piece of that story. According to the Lisburn Museum, the site was once home to Stewarts' Mill, one of the town's most prominent thread mills. By the 1980s the mill era was long over, and reports from the time describe a multi-million-pound development that would run through the existing Crazy Prices store and connect a big new shopping complex to Bow Street. Crazy Prices — a name that will date anyone who remembers it — is long gone, but the mall it anchored is still here, holding down the top of the street.
What makes it work as a day out is the setting. This isn't an out-of-town box you drive to and drive home from: the front door opens straight onto the pedestrianised main street, with Lisburn Square's cafés and the Glasshouse a couple of minutes one way and the linen museum the other. Park once in the £1-an-hour multi-storey and you've got the mall, the street, the square and a free museum all on foot.
So the honest pitch is this: it's a solid, useful, local shopping centre rather than a landmark — but on a wet Saturday with kids to entertain, a Primark run, a toy shop, a coffee stop and a whole city centre out the front door adds up to a better afternoon than the forecast deserved.