Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’
@GP wrote:
The sketch of the rear of the Marrowbone Lane building reminds me of the rear of a building on Aungier Street. I don’t live in Ireland so I can’t go and check the details but the back of this building was visible when the new hostel was being built on Little Longford Street. If you are on Little Longford Street, going west, you need to turn right on to Aungier Street and it is the second building on the right. The maps. live.com page shows scaffolding a year or so ago. Worth looking up?
GP pointed this out last July and I’ve had a look at it every couple of weeks since then, but there’s still no sign of the scaffolding coming down which makes looking at the rear very difficult. The house is no. 9 Aungier Street and is just three doors down from the houses damaged in a fire on Saturday.
rear views of 9 Aungier St. through the scaffolding and netting (one with gable profile high-lighted) and the facade of 30 Jervis St. for comparison.
The roof profile is strongly suggestive of a close coupled twin Billy (in the 30 Jervis Street mould), but the front facade is 19th century and it looks like a lateral roof was added at the same time which masks, but does not completely hide, the twin axial roof volumes behind. Small front chimney stacks also look like a later alteration, in this case apparently they augment the original corner chimney stacks a bit to the rear. This practice did exist in the later 18th and early 19th century and an example exists at no. 20 Molesworth Street where the full corner chimney stack was dismantled and replaced by a pair of conventional flat Georgian chimney breasts erected in an elaborate attempt at modernising an otherwise largely intact Dutch Billy interior.
The rear elevation has also been renewed in 19th century yellow brick, but the house may still retain early features and for that roof profile to have survived there has to be a very substantial original timber beam running the full depth of the house, under the central valley.
Although there’s no particular sign of any building activity on site, there is a architect’s sign board belonging to MESH Architects in one of the front windows. Perhaps MESH could be persuaded to post some photographs of the interior, the stairs, or the roof structure?
Of course the house may have no features that are earlier than it’s current 19th century appearance, but it certainly equates very well with a very large house on the site depicted on Rocque’s map of 1756 and we know that Aungier Street was decked in Billys, including the fine one three doors south at no. 12 (the birthplace of Thomas Moore) and around the corner on Stephen St. are the surviving pair pointed out by Devin and Punchbowl [outlined in yellow].
12 Aungier Street, subsequently reconstructed in a half hearted fashion.
