Dublin Street Lighting
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Hello everyone. Well i just came across this website by mistake and wow its blown me away. Just to let you know who I am. Myself and my dad, David are responsible for alot of the lighting fixtures you are chatting about on your message board. Our jobs include all the gas lanterns in the phoenix park, parkgate entrance, grafton street, henry street, talbot street, dublin castle, city hall, o connell bridge, and many other places around the city. We build all our lanterns by hand and its mainly divided between copper and brass lanterns. The silver lanterns you refer to are also ours! not all of them, but we do manufacture them alot for ireland and the uk. If anyone would like to know anything about our lanterns or pictures i would be delighted. I have thousands of pictures of our work around Ireland. We have just completed manufacturing lanterns for all our garda stations. Ok nice to see all your posts on the board.
Regards
EricYeah grahm we sure do. The lanterns pictured in grafton street our our design along with the garda lanterns and the castle lanterns which can be seen in the courtyard of Dublin castle.
So you’ve been doing it for some time then I presume considering some of those mentioned date from the late 80s?
Do you work for DCC Public Lighting Division or are you contracted out can I ask?I’m a big fan of your Castle lanterns – these I presume are the copper lamps mounted on older standards in the Upper Yard?
What do you think about constantly replicating Dublin’s trademark silver column in so many places round the city?
(sorry about the twenty questions :o)I love this lamp thread.
When I was in Barcelona there a few weeks ago some of Gaudi’s hanging street lamps reminded me of the early 20th century lamps in Dublin.
This one I snapped close to Gaudi’s La Pedrera.
The architecture in Barcelona would make you sick. Notice its football like globe 🙂 This is a shot of a 3 globe lamp although, the globes are identical city-wide.
I totally agree with you, Graham, about the level of detail in the Micheal Collins film. They certainly made an effort.
Lovely stuff there. Excuse the ignorance, but did Gaudi design the furniture of his streets too?!
It looks fabulous.I don’t get what the mesh is for either on those Barcelona posts, or on the 1892 Dublin ones below – it hardly protects them from anything does it?
During the BBC Proms, aside from the irritating practice that it was, the video footage played over some of the pieces showed London in the 1890s with almost exactly the same posts as those above.
You see them in archive footage from all over Europe from the time.Yes. After he graduated from college his first commission was to design and build the street lamps you see in Barcelona today. It’s possible that it’s some sort of shatter proofing wire.. just a thought.
Graham, hope you don’t mind that I stray off from Dublin for a bit. I couldn’t resist posting up some of my other lamp shots. 🙂 I’m sure you’ll like them.
Gaudi’s first ever municipal commision. The fabulous lanterns in Plaça Reial.
Look at those evil heads. These are the lamps outside Government Buildings in Plaça Sant Jaume.
You call that a lamp? This is a lamp! Have you ever seen anything like it?
😀
Yikes! Drool or what! 🙂
Beautiful images, particularly the second one – what lovely detailing.
Those lamps are interesting outside Govt Buildings there in that they are but a set of many such lamps around the world’s capitals that have been specifically designed for public spaces, or to tie in with municipal/government buildings.
Right across Europe and seemingly South America you see them a lot – or in the US the lamps outside the Capitol spring to mind.
Or the Mall & Palace in London, or outside the Parliament Building in Vienna etc etc.Unfortunately a practice that never developed in Ireland 🙁
@Graham Hickey wrote:
😀
Yikes! Drool or what! 🙂
Indeed! 🙂
These lamps below are standard all around the city but they vary slightly depending on where you are.
These ones below are outside the government buildings. They are well looked after, in fact most of them look brand new. They are adorned with the city’s coat of arms (vertical stripes for Catalonia) topped with the King’s crown.
Here is a different version of the lamp. Oddly, some of the crown prongs the lamps appear warped and bent. I don’t know if this is weathering or perhaps Gaudi gave them his organic treatment. 🙂 I really don’t think these are his lamps though.
This Chinese lamp belongs to the former umbrella shop on La Rambla. I can’t find much info on it unfortunately but the shop owner was obviously not short of cash at the time.
Look at his fierce fangs and fiery beard, his sharp claws gripping the bamboo. The crafting on the bamboo is spectacular also.
Anyway, that’s me all out of Barcelona lamps!
Gah – out with you! –>
🙂
Very striking images there Morlan – you captured the first 3-arm one just at the right time with that shaft of sunlight creeping in! What a fine collection of lamps they have.
If only we had ones like them, or these, in Dublin:
oh wait…
@Graham Hickey wrote:
1870s
To start, these small gas-powered column lanterns were used to light O’]http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v219/Dublin1/1870s.jpg[/IMG]
Close up:
Among the other places where the 1870s lamps appeared were on the two arched-back bridges flanking the Four Courts: O’Donovan Rossa Bridge (seen here circa 1900) and Father Mathew Bridge.
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In the early years of the 20th century, the single heads were replaced with these great looking double heads, seen here on Father Mathew Bridge in the 1950s….
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….and here on O’Donovan Rossa Bridge in 1922.
The two bridges at the Four Courts seem to have been the only place in the city that these particular double heads were used (special treatment for the special building).~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
[align=center:d01z33u2]
[/align:d01z33u2]But, being the great pioneers in conservation of the historic urban environment that we are, what do we do with these lovely lamps? Yes, we remove them (in about 1970) and put them (one of them) in the city lamp “museum” in the park in Merrion Square, to complement the “fussy municipal flower beds” and “tree plantings commemorating minor dignitaries” 😀 as planner Fergal McCabe so aptly put it recently.
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. . 
And finally, a comparison of the 1950s picture with the same view today. The corner building in the ’50s pic was demolished in 1983 to create a slip lane for traffic turning left from Bridge Street onto the Quays :rolleyes: , destroying the enclosure of the bridge.
Indeed – must take a closer look at the Merrion lamps. Most of them seem to be ‘novelty’ lamps from the period from parks and promenades etc, with very few used on the city streets, so it’s great to see the double-header in real life!
There definitely ought to be a little plaque of info regarding each lamp in the Park.
The fact that it probably wouldn’t be possible to do this because no one knows where most of them came from is indicative of the piece-meal tokenistic nature of their placing here – any old lamp from any old place popped in any old corner.The proportions of those converted double-headers are just ridiculous (!), but were fantastic pieces of street history 🙁
(dare I say they’re frighteningly similar to 80s shopping centre lighting 🙂 – the Frascati Centre springs to mind 😮 )
The little bulbs/glass cases of the lamps are particularly interesting.Miniature lamps ought to be reinstalled on these bridges, in character with their historic scale; there’s nothing worse than full size streetlights poking up from old bridges.
Had to laugh at the Michael Collins film at the way that all they could do was paint the crude unfinished modern posts a dark green on O’Donovan Rossa 🙂
Should have left them that colour…There are some taller street ones in there as well – ones that should never have been removed. The whole concept is so dodgy, isn’t it? – to paraphrase Joni Mitchell “we take all the lamps and put ‘em in a lamp museum, then charge all the people a dollar and a half just to see ‘emâ€! (well not quite). The surviving genuine historic street lamp standards in the city have basically been reduced to two types; the silver ‘feminine’ shamrock heads & the ‘masculine’ stout bases, with a few stragglers like some swan necks in the north & south inner suburbs, and a few shorter posts there as well.
By ridiculous do you mean the head being too big for the post Graham? Yeah they were a small post but I think they looked great on the bridge with the double heads! True, full size ones on the bridges would be so wrong – except in the case of some of the larger bridges (e.g. the cool-looking black modern lamps on Grattan Bridge).
For the last 20 years at least, the mock-Victorian gaslamp has been a staple of suburban shopping centre landscaping, regional town regeneration, dickieing-up of villages etc etc. (smug, smug, smug… 😀 )
🙂
Yes the double head is way too big for the post, and the large pedestal base ends up consuming half of the shaft!
But lovely pieces, and their miniature proportions were just perfect for the bridges.
To be honest I’m not sure about the black Grattan Bridge posts either – they look great in themselves but think they still look a bit daft sticking up in the middle of the river in the fashion they do.
Surely the now-exceptionally bright seahorses are sufficient to light the bridge? (were the fridges not there of course).Have to say I thought that was an excellent piece of historic/modern street furniture juxtaposition; the minimalist black lamps being placed in front of (but not too close to) the ornate seahorse lamps. This was subsequently ruined on the east side when the fridges were put between the modern & old lamps…….more reason to remove the damn things!!!
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