1868 – St. Ann’s Church of Ireland, Dawson Street, Dublin

The original facade of the church by Isaac Wills, designed in 1720 but never fully completed, was demolished in 1868 to make way for the current facade. In 1866 when a limited competition to design a replacement facade was announced, The Dublin Builder remarked that “A good deal of unnecessary sentiment is being wasted over the proposed destruction of what there is of the existing front. The venerable antiquity of a hundred years and some elegancies of detail are not sufficient merits to counterbalance an unremarkable design in a state of hideous incompletion.” Designed in a Lombardo-Romanesque style, this was also never completed with the northern tower remaining without the ornate belfry designed for it. This has disrupted the flow of the building from the rectory to the spire. The original tower and spire (on the left of the photograph) were to complete the gradual rise in height of the composition.

There is a fine galleried interior with box pews and many memorials that reputedly contains more stained glass than any other church in Dublin and includes work by Wilhelmina Geddes, Mayer, Warrington and the O’Connor family. The close proximity of the nearby office block reduces the impact of many of these windows by curtailing the amount of light available.