O’ Connell Street, Dublin

The confusion generated by conflicting historical depictions of the roofline and parapets of the JWT building at the corner of O’Connell Street Upper and Henry Street, dating to c. 1751, can now be said to be largely resolved.

As previously posted here, this curious drawing of 1818 showed us a tall parapet wall with attic windows that do not align with the pitch behind, and a gabled or exposed hipped roof.

While this image of 1827 showed a regular matching parapet. The windows were wrong though.

A Brocas print from around the same time showed the former mismatched parapet – so two pictures against one now (though windows also wrong here).

While 1860s and later photographs showed the parapet matched up either way by that stage.

However, this remarkable image shows things in an entirely new light. Kindly supplied by historian Peter Walsh, the picture is from amongst the first sets of photographs ever taken in Ireland c. 1845. Here we can clearly make out the original massive Georgian hipped roof and mismatched parapets!

Also a cute little dormer in the mix. We can also see that the vertical ranks of fenestration are not spaced evenly as they are today, confirming what we suspected – that the entire facade was likely to have been refaced in the mid-19th century.

Below is the wider view showing long-lost Victorian facades on North Earl Street, of a frothy character typical of the 19th century embellishments on Sackville Street, and very similar to elegant stucco fragments that still survive around the corner on Marlborough Street today.

Two angled chimneystacks also penetrate the JWT corner building today – one on the back wall (in line with the fat rear chimney in the above photo) and one on the northern party wall. This is almost certainly the oldest building on O’Connell Street. It is extraordinary that one of the first buildings to be built on Gardiner’s Mall is also one of the last to survive, and even more so next to the cauldron that was the GPO.

That’s what I was thinking too gunter, but would it match up with the concept of a two-bay boarding house with attendant three-bay private residence as depicted by Oliver Grace? We know only too well the Irish classical school’s love affair with expressing internal functions through window spacing…

Nonetheless, I think we can take the window spacings of all the above drawings with a pinch of salt – they’re all too absract in each of their own ways to warrant in-depth analysis. I think three clustered windows to the middle are the most likely, as we know that a staircase originally ran up the centre of the building, and still does in an altered state, accessed from the street via a centrally-placed entrance door, in the early classical/baroque tradition.

What I find interesting is that the effort was made to reface the entire facade in brick, rather than just shift the odd ope, build up the parapet and smother the whole lot in Victorian icing. It would have been so much cheaper. This is especially curious given that many WSC brick facades on Sackville Street had already been given this fashionable new treatment by 1850. Perhaps there were structural problems with the building? We are also now presented with the prospect that there may be a yellow brick facade underneath that render today *rubs hands*. The fact that we know a relatively modern brick facade of c. 1850 is likely to lie underneath the render also pretty much proves that it was the impact of 1916 that caused the building to be rendered – there would have been no other reason to do so.

Quite possible yes. It’s hard to think of any other reason why a facade would be tweaked in such a minor way at such enormous expense.

The publishing period would also be quite small, ranging from c. 1845 to 1860, as we know the alterations were in place through late 1860s photographs, while the old-fashioned new Georgian windows that were installed – and as still survive to the side elevation today – date the modification to the late 1840s or early 1850s. A quick search of The Irish Times archive beckons…

It really goes to show though doesn’t it – even in a solid, formulaic-looking case as this, buildings are not always as they seem.

Ah Shaw’s – of course! Doh!

I’m delighted with this, as from day one I thought these alterations had an 1840s appearance – a rare enough survivor in the city centre. How we can now pinpoint the date of the alterations so accurately is pretty darn impressive! It’s incredibly rare one encounters such a well-charted history of a modest building from its inception to the present day, especially over two and a half centuries. The symmetry of the original Georgian centrally-placed entrance and staircase is extremely apparent above, even though it’s a replacement shopfront.

Also note the above Shaw’s chimney is the same chimney as visible in this c. 1860 photograph, and as still evident today. This is not the rear wall corner stack, but what would appear to be an 1840s insertion into a room-dividing wall. This manifests itself as a standard rectangular stack inside the building.