Re: Re: Thomas Street & James Street, Dublin!

Great images. So it looks like we lost another early house as part of the below site clearance – the white chap with characteristically low proportions and small windows, with the inserted ground floor shop gobbling up some of the first floor.

The marvellously sophisticated house to the left is a Regency or slightly earlier makeover of a similarly early house, incorporating the fabric of the original dwelling including door joinery and a quaint barley sugar staircase, until the place was gutted by fire in the 1980s and further insulted with an enforced attic storey removal by the Corpo’s Dangerous Buildings department.

The icing on the cake was the insertion of this delightful affair, the very picture of speculation, which I believe to be one of Brian O’Halloran’s earlier contributions to the city.

The loss of Nos. 15-16 Thomas Street with its giant double cruciform roof pictured below – seemingly one of the largest mansions built on Thomas Street (though Rocque is unconvinced) and later subdivided into a solid pair of houses in the Aungier Street manner – is beyond dispiriting. At least we still have the more classic Billys at No. 20 and No. 21, of which this new image is something of a revelation in showing what appears to be the original, very low, non-cruciform roof behind the added parapet of No. 21.

There also appears to be the very faintest outline of a cruciform angle on the shared chimneystack on the No. 20 side. A magnificent classic Dublin house at No. 14 there too – hadn’t seen that one before.

In other news, a recent planning application for no less than a bookies on the corner of Meath Street in the grand Victorian former Cash Converters premises has just been put out to further information.

This is on foot of a very emphatic observation by the Conservation Officer highlighting the prominence and quality of the building, the rare survival of a high quality Victorian fascia, the general preposterousness of a shopfront within a shopfront, the crudeness of the proposed Ladbrokes signage and corporate branding, the Fáilte Ireland east-west spine route currently under development, and of course the ACA.

Curiously, the planner highlights two major concerns: 1) all of the above, and 2) a bookies being placed on a high profile corner. Yet the Further Information only refers to the former. A glaring omission I would have thought.