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

@GrahamH wrote:

Take, for example, the approach to public realm improvement now being undertaken as part of the QBC. This is hardly an illustrious start. If ever you saw engineer-led ‘design’, this is it – ranks of galvanised electrical cabinets mounted against the historic curtilage of pretty much the only historic public building on James’s Street! If you went out of your way to make a bags of this, you couldn’t achieve better.

Yes you are right to bring this up Graham. I spoke to the DCC Engineer about the placements of these cabinets: he knew about the historic nature of the building and would have preferred to place them elsewhere but he felt he had no choice. The cabinets themselves are not mounted against the historic wall (which is a Protected Structure, built I think 1860s), and instead are free-standing and mounted on the pavement, so at least in the future they could be removed with no impact on the wall. We excavated the underground holes for the cabinets, partly by hand, and found more the 17th century metalled surface I described above, and above it some nice late 17th/early 18th century artefacts.

Similar cabinets were also supposed to be positioned further east on James Street outside the old Post Office/trio of red-brick Protected Structures; in this case the DCC Engineer in charge of the project was able to change their location away from the historic building.