Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

@Devin wrote:

Re: 32 Thomas Street . . . without actually seeing what’s there, I think it’s just fanciful to consider it’s an early beam associated with the Dutch type gable roof.

Then there’s the lack of pictorial evidence of twin gables on a two bay house.

. . . . given the level of conjecture involved here, I think you should be a little more open to other possibilities for this roof.

The fate of this house, and the rest of the Frawleys site, hangs on a Bord Pleanála thread, with the decision due to be finally made today.

I believe that I’ve interpreted this house correctly and that where there is conjecture it is very well grounded, I believe that the report submitted with the planning application, in stating that ”this building dates from the later 18th century” with no more significance than that, criminally under-values this structure.

Of course you are entitled to question this and put forward a different interpretation, but you also have to stand that interpretation up, you’ve got to explain what a series of houses with Dutch Billy plans and Dutch Billy features are doing with some kind of totally uncharacteristic supposedly later ‘Georgian’ roofs.

You have a certain standing in the conservation community, but, like me and probably everyone else who’s been suckled in our formative years on Maurice Craig and Eddie McParland, we’ve been dazzled by the brightness of our Georgian heritage and we’ve seen Dublin through a Georgian lens, it takes a real effort to see through that to the more dimly lit layers beyond. Until very recently I was totally ignorant of the true extent of the Dutch Billy movement outside Dublin, in places like Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Drogheda etc.

I may have loved these building since the day I read my first Peter Walsh article in the 1970s, but I am not blindly passionate, I’ve posted nothing on this thread that is ”fanciful” or that I haven’t held up to scrutiny.

It’s the conservation community that needs to wake up and wipe the sleep from it’s eyes. I don’t want to be left picking through the rubble of this house next week, trying to find evidence on which of us was right.