Re: Re: ‘Dutch Billys’

These are just a couple of images of no. 55 Abbey Street, as was. The site is now occupied by a particularly nasty ’80s brown brick office block opposite the old Adelphi Cinema.

I think this view comes from around the time of the Eucharistic Congress, hence the bunting. Despite the rendering of the facade and the flat parapet, the window arrangement looks completely untouched and shows again that ‘Billy’ preference for a pair of much wider windows at first floor level, with a standard three bay arrangement above a string course at 2nd floor level and, in this case, a pair of much smaller windows tight together in what would have been the focal point of a curvilinear gable, see the very low rain water outlets on both sides.

It’s not clear what’s happened to the roof, it’s ridge should be peeping up above the parapet, perhaps it had been replaced completely by this time.

Also altered is the ground floor where a a full shopfront has been inserted. There’s a very interesting drawing in the Georgian Society Records [Vol. II] from c. 1910 of an elegant timber doorcase which is identified as no. 55 Middle Abbey St.

Timber doorcases, which were standard and greatly varied in England at this time, are very rare in Dublin, but that could be because they’ve all vanished, not necessarilly because they weren’t there in the first place.