O’ Connell Street, Dublin
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does anyone know the target completion date for the upgrading of o’connell street (for the section up to parnell street).
also, will the the upgrading of parnell sq be done in tandem with this section of o’connell street or immediately afterwards ?bnc
Brendan we have all learnd to be patient in regard to the completion of O’Connell Street and as such it is impossible to say that it will be completed on a specific month, but I’d say it won’t be too long now.
In regard to Parnell Square the plan: http://www.dublincity.ie/Images/Parnell%20Square%20bookletc_tcm35-11289.pdf
will be carried out in three phases, this is possibly the best plan yet produced for Dublin City Council.fair play to HH, they’ve done their homework. extending o’connell street and pushing people up the hill with the church as a focal point would be interesting to see.
Definitely James Howley did a top class job on this and I’d say that a lot of the clarity in the plan is derived from his intimate knowledge of the area based upon having their offices on O’Connell St. The Church has fantastic potential to act as a real landmark and will no doubt be a great draw up Parnell Square.
Agreed – and the focus on the church as said, should work particularly well – not that it doesn’t already: a very striking building, and well designed for the site.
Poor Daniel 🙁
And a couple of other images below too.
Presumably just to access the statue on top, whatever about chemicals, the scaffolding will have to go all the way up. The plywood cladding will also have the added benefit of protecting workers from the notoriously high winds in the area.
Sigh – what is is with middle-aged women and O’Connell St? Just as I was taking that picture there was a shreek behind me as yet another woman stumbled flat out from the pavement onto the road :rolleyes:
And she just lay there in a heap with juggernauts rumbling by 😮Had to haul her up with the aid of another man and bring a chair over from Bachelors Walk to the median (see Phil, on-street coffee places have their uses 😉 ), where she just sat sunning herself in the morning sunshine in the middle of the busiest crossing in the country!
Her leg was in bits – but we eventually put in a taxi and sent her off, God knows where 😀Another good deed for the day 🙂
Dear Madam,
Another great scoop for the Irish Times. This story only appeared in the Irish Independent eight days ago. Is this a record?Irish Times, April 14: O’Connell Street statues to be cleaned in €300,000 programme by Paul Cullen
The historic statues on Dublin’s O’Connell Street are to be cleaned up in a four-month conservation programme which started this week.
As part of the programme, which will cost €300,000, the bronze statues will be coated in a thin layer of wax to provide protection against pollution.
The programme is the latest phase of the refurbishment of the capital’s main thoroughfare; further works to improve the appearance of the top of O’Connell Street are due to start later in the year.
Cleaning and refurbishment of the O’Connell and Parnell statues at either end of the street will account for most of the budget, according to Dublin City Council’s heritage officer Donncha Ó Dúlaing.
The four victory angels and 30 figures on the O’Connell statue will have to be cleaned delicately using bristle brushes.
“The bronze is very black, though generally in good nick, but it has no protection against pollution,” says Mr Ó Dúlaing.
The other statues to be refurbished are those of Jim Larkin, William Smith O’Brien, Father Matthew and Sir John Grey. Two nearby figures are also included in the programme – James Joyce in North Earl Street and the Sheahan memorial on Burgh Quay, which commemorates an RIC man who was overcome by fumes trying to rescue a worker in the sewers.
Information panels on each statue will be mounted on the surrounding hoardings, according to Mr Ó Dúlaing.
A number of the statues have incurred damage over the years, but there are no plans to repair these defects. They include bullet holes in the O’Connell statue which date back to the 1916 Rising and damage to an angel from a loyalist bomb in the 1960s. Father Matthew has been missing a finger since Nelson’s Pillar but he too will have to soldier on without it.
“The defects are part of the history of our nation, and we won’t be touching them,” says Mr Ó Dúlaing.And the original from that little read newspaper, the Irish Independent.
Irish Independent April 6, 2005
HEADLINE: CITY’S LANDMARK STATUES TO GET Euro 300,000 FACELIFTTHE famous landmark statues along Dublin’s O’Connell Street are to get a Euro 300,000 makeover starting next Monday which aims to restore them to their former glory.
The city authorities have decided to leave the many bullet holes from the 1916 Easter Rising in the statue of Daniel O’Connell, which are part of the capital’s history.
And they have also decided not to replace the missing fingers on the statue of Fr Matthew. They were blown off when the nearby Nelson’s Pillar was destroyed in a bomb blast.
Some of the seven statues and monuments are badly damaged from air pollution or have become defaced by decades of bird droppings.
From Monday, scaffolding and hoarding will be erected around the monuments to allow work to get underway.
Experts in bronze from the UK and stonemasons from Ireland will spend months working on the statues, which have become grimy from air pollution, bird dropping, and decay.
Donncha O Dulaing, Dublin City Council heritage officer, said the clean-up operation was long overdue and the monuments would get the specialist cleaning they deserved.
“We decided to leave the bullet holes in Daniel O’Connell as they are part of our heritage,” he told the Irish Independent yesterday.
Mr O Dulaing said that close inspection of some of the monuments revealed the bronze was now very black and dirty looking.
“We are not cleaning them just for the sake of cleaning them. Some are in need of urgent cleaning. It will be done to best possible conservation standards,” said Mr O Dulaing.
The heritage officer said the work, which starts on Monday next, would take about four months at a cost of Euro 300,000.
The project is being undertaken as part of the ongoing regeneration of O’Connell Street, which has seen the introduction of wider pavements, new road surfaces, and many attractive new trees along the country’s main street.
Naming the people in whose memory the monuments were built, and the year they were built, figures frequently in quiz questions.
They are Charles Stewart Parnell (erected 1911); Fr Matthew of the temperance movement (1890); James Joyce (1990); Jim Larkin (1979); Sir John Gray, an MP and instigator of Dublin’s water scheme (1879); revolutionary William Smith O’Brien (1870); and Daniel O’Connell (1882).
An eighth monument on nearby Burgh Quay to RIC constable Patrick Sheahan, who died rescuing a worker from a gas leak in 1905, is also to be restored. It was erected in 1906.
Treacy HoganEnvironment CorrespondentMoney very well spent
I don’t think they’ve ever been cleaned, save the bases of the plinths of some of the monuments which may been pressure-washed but a handful of times over their lifetime.
Agreed that it is money well spent – indeed I would have thought it to cost over the half-million mark given the scale of O’Connell and Parnell. Presumably the former is guzzling most of the funds.
These monuments are of national importance even if they’re nothing spectacular by international standards.
The fact that Dublin City Council is shouldering the entire cost is a credit to them – even if they’ve no option 🙂I just wonder, what would some parties/people’s reaction be if it were necessary to carry out an extensive and costly restoration of the Albert Monument on Leinster Lawn…
Here’s Eloquence with the nasty wound in her upper arm – I’d get that seen to 🙂
@Graham Hickey wrote:
I just wonder, what would some parties/people’s reaction be if it were necessary to carry out an extensive and costly restoration of the Albert Monument on Leinster Lawn…
Don’t you mean the Worlds most important piece of car-park heritage art?
…the unfinished and endearingly lop-sided lampposts being particularly worthy of conservation…
Here’s the new trees on Lower O’Cll St. This whole stretch up to the GPO looks best in the morning I think.
The sun just bounces off Easons and Manfield Chambers and the GPO and new paving and the shiny bins etc – lovely and bright and warm – so uplifting 🙂And loads of space around then too, with the wide pavements being deserted at times.
That image must have been taken early morning to get such a deserted look, it can still be quite packed walking down there for most of the day. The light in the photo is great and really shows the quality of the Mansfield chambers clearly.
I have to say that the wooden coverings around the lower trunks of the trees are ingenuis, they are reasonably skanger proof, made from a sustainable material and are totally visually inobstrusive. While the trees are quite young now, there will be a very natural vista down there in a couple of decades time.
Yes, the coverings are great, even if they do cover some of the white bark of the weeping birches on the median.
The lower stretch is usually very empty between 9 and 11 or so – great time to be there 🙂Manfield Chambers needs a restoration of its magificent steel windows (the wooden interior frames are a bit unfortunate from outside).
Also a removal of the nasty replacement windows in all of its top floor is in order, including the Abbey St elevation, as with that billboard.The Clarks shopfront supports the upper facade well, esp the piers aligning with the columns above.
The windows are unfortunate and I very much doubt that anyone would replace single-glazed timber windows with single-glazed steel. The detailing in the Mansfield Chambers is of an exceptionally high standard, there are quite an impressive collection of 1920’s buildings on the Street when you think about it. In terms of the broader building lines on the Street this location may contain the most sustainable development model in the City even if was largely assembled so many years ago.
Yes, the density of five storeys that these were built to is impressive, and how extensive office space was built above retailers at ground level which really helped in boosting the city centre.
Despite the WSC development all about the city centre, most of it is still only 4 storeys, even much Grafton St not going above 4 floors.Which is why I’ve wondered about this terrace beside Clery’s for ages.
There is something very suspicious about it. How is it that all of O’Connell St is 5 storeys, yet this terrace is only 4?
Ever since Lower O’Connell St was built in the 1780s this single terrace has always been 4 storeys – why?!
Not even the Wide Streets Commission developed it, or properly at least.And through the Victorian age, past the Edwardians and out the other side of 1916 it still remained at four storeys!
No wonder Horace O’Rourke was dissatisfied with the way Lower O’Cll St was redeveloped post-1916.Why would the owners only rebuild to the previous height – was it just not worth their while going higher or was there another reason? It’s almost as if there’s sightlines being protected or something…
The image below is a composite of the terrace ‘through the ages’, including a Georgian terrace on the site in 1818 which seems to be a surviving part of Drogheda St given the older window frames and mish-mash of heights etc.
In a later Victorian image below, the parapet seems to have been regularised, if not the entire terrace rebuilt according to the WSC at late stage.This terrace really doesn’t seem to make sense, especially when one considers the old Bank of Ireland next door, which as you can see in one pic, has been historically taller than the others since the Victorians got away with a tall structure next to the bulk of the old Clery’s.
So when rebuilding started – this single tall building to the side of Clery’s was rebuilt to its original height, while the rest of the terrace was still kept to its orginal four storeys!
In the context of the rest of the street this terrace is not successful in adding to the whole in height terms.The difference in Clearys then and now is so pronounced between those images, I’d have to say I prefer the newer model.
Well classicism is always going to win favour in these decluttered times 🙂
Yes the New Mart Monster Store/Delany’s/Imperial Hotel/Clery’s – what ever you want to call it – was an extraordinary building. Very unusual to have such an early, not to mention so large an example of Victorian architecture in Dublin city centre.
As far as I can make out the Imperial Hotel opened in 1837, but probably in a couple of Georgians like the Gresham, before the new building was built with the monster store on the ground floor, in 1850-3. The door there to the right provided access to the hotel and the floors directly above it are also distinguished from the rest of the facade by a slight change in design. I woudn’t be surprised if this famous 1853 watercolour of the street was commissioned by the owners…
The burnt out shell of it post-1916 is an extraordinary sight.In the reconstruction the new Clery’s consumed the whole terrace right up to what is now Sackville Place: you can see in the image above that there’s more buildings to the right of it unlike today.
The only thing that I can think of about this terrace’s height is that the site was left undeveloped because of the major building proposed for the site – notably plans for what is now Connolly Station to be located there, opposite the GPO.
But if so, then the WSC must have had plans for the site long before the railways, if they left it undeveloped in the 1780s.
Did they have something in mind?Yes – the Pro Cathedral was proposed for this site – however ferverent opposition from the old protestant ascendancy stopped this from happening. Hence it was built on Marlborough Street – inconspicuous and out of place.
As for your question as to who commissioned the painting of Sackville Street – it was altered by the owners, with the doctored version having a man with a sign standing on the street advertising Delaneys Mart and Imperial Hotel.
There ya go!
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