The good news is that this building has not been demolished.
When I first photographed this building about ten years ago a waiter in a nearby restaurant told me that it was to be converted into a hotel but this proved to be untrue. It would appear that it has been incorporated into a larger 17-storey office complex. The historic building and the new build structure will be linked at first and second floor, grouped around a central courtyard.
The same waiter also told me that the Ewart building was originally a box factory but further investigation leads me to believe that the business in question was located at 35 Bedford street which is now the Bridge House JD Wetherspoon [a superpub].
Because of its size and location it is/was not easy to photograph this four-storey sandstone building, which as lain empty for about twenty years. It was designed by James Hamilton, also the architect of the Waring Street Ulster Bank, now the Merchant Hotel.
The building is/was described as follows “A large prestigious Victorian style building situated on the corner of Bedford Street and Franklin Street constructed in 1869 with further extensions in 1883 and 1937. A former linen mill the building has lay vacant for several decades which has resulted in the building falling into heavy disrepair. The three storey corner site has been provided with an impressive brown/grey Scottish sandstone façade including architectural sandstone detailing including circular columns, decorative arched window openings and a sandstone parapet wall detail at roof level. A dual pitched natural slate roof incorporating Georgian wire glazed roof light has been provided over the majority of the building whilst a dome roof structure finished in lead has been provided over the corner elevation.”
Note: In November 2015 it was announced that this former linen warehouse was to be transformed into a 21st century office development. The front of the building was to be retained [does front mean exterior?] but the rest was to be demolished if everything went according to plan. At the time the Ulster Architectural Heritage Society (UAHS) lodged an objection to the planning proposal, claiming the planned new build behind the remnant facade “appears unsympathetic to remaining characteristics in design, form, materials, techniques and detailing”.
I was standing on James Larkin Road at St Anne’s Park and noticed that it was still raining across the water and it looked ghostly so I made a few attempts to capture the scene as I saw it.
The Poolbeg power station is situated adjacent to the now-decommissioned Pigeon House generating station, where electricity was first generated in 1903 (with the distinction of being the first in the world to generate three phase power).
The thermal station chimneys completed in 1971 are among the tallest structures in Ireland and are visible from most of Dublin city. Number 1 chimney is 207.48m (680 ft 9in) high. Number 2 chimney is 207.8m (681 ft 9in) high. The chimneys are featured prominently in the video for the song “Pride (In The Name Of Love)” by U2. Dublin City Councillor and historian Dermot Lacey began a process to list the chimneys for preservation to safeguard their future after the Station was to close in 2010. This was later refused by the Council Planning Department.
They were subsequently listed as protected structures in July 2014.
The name “Pigeon House” comes from a caretaker’s lodge built there in 1760. At the time the site was a wooden platform known pragmatically as “The Piles”, at the seaward end of the Ballast Office Wall embankment. The lodge was intended to provide rest and storage facilities for workers as they built the Great South Wall, a massive sea wall project that began in 1761 and would take three decades to complete.
The first caretaker, John Pidgeon, was appointed in 1761. Pidgeon opened an eatery to provide refreshments for the workers and the growing number of travelers arriving into Dublin Bay. “Pigeon’s House” as it was known became one of the most popular restaurants in Dublin.
Around 1793, as the Great South Wall was nearing completion, a hotel opened at the site, the Pigeon House Hotel.
The hotel did not last long for after the 1798 Rebellion, the area was transformed into a military fort, the Pigeon House Fort. The hotel building was converted into the officers’ accommodation within the fort, which then grew over the next hundred years to include an armoury, a hospital, and trenches crossed by drawbridges.
Between 1878 and 1881, a sewage pipe was installed along the former Ballast Office Wall (now the landward half of the Great South Wall). In 1897, the military complex was sold to the Dublin Corporation and developed into a sewage processing facility, as well as the city’s first major electrical power generating station. It was used for power generation until it was decommissioned in 1976, and the Poolbeg plant is still known locally as the Pigeon House.
The modern Poolbeg station was named after the Poolbeg lighthouse which formed the outer end of the Great South Wall. The lighthouse, completed in 1767 when construction of the Great South Wall was just beginning, stood originally at the edge of a natural tidal pool at the entrance to Dublin Harbor known as “Poole Begge”, which was surrounded at low tide with sand bars.
The Poolbeg power station was constructed in two separate phases, beginning in the 1960s. The ESB decided to construct the station in 1965 and the initial development was completed in 1971 with the construction of Units 1 and 2 at a cost of 20 million Irish pounds. The original Pigeon House generators remained on standby duty until 1976. Unit 3 was completed in 1978 at a cost of 40 million pounds.
The combined cycle station was constructed in the 1990s. CG14 was commissioned in 1994, CG15 in 1998 and ST16 in 2001.
You must be logged in to post a comment.