Devin
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@bloke wrote:
This is where the anti Rural development groups fail….
To encourage people into villages & towns something more than the current model of the housing estate is required – and until a working model is in place the pro rural development people will remain just that.This is where the pro-Bungalow groups fail; – they describe people who would like to see clustered rural housing, good design and rural public transport as “anti Rural Developmentâ€.
….A typical scene from an Irish town.
We always had visual awareness, right up to the 1950s/’60s, when we began to lose it in a massive way. And when I say ‘we’ I mean the common man/woman. There was always quality and aptness applied to buildings, no matter how humble. I just don’t know what happened to lead to the point where we think it’s ok to do things like to the details of the terrace above….
@phil wrote:
How can councils approach this issue. Is it up to people who care to complain when it happens. If people living in a listed building suddenly change their windows to PVC, is it up to a neighbor to write an objection? In many cases this could cause more trouble than it is worth, so people might be less likely to object. Is it up to a designated person in each council to approach these issues?
There is a bit about this on the first page, Phil. Essentially, changing windows in a Protected Structure requires planning permission. So if a Prot. Struc. has replaced old windows with PVC (or even aluminium windows with PVC / early PVC with new PVC), you can make a complaint to the Planning Enforcement section of the relevant council. There begins the enforcement process of inspection / report / warning letter(s) / final letter.
Unlike a 3rd party letter regarding a planning application, an enforcement complaint is anonymous, so there shouldn’t be any problem with neighbours knowing.
In some cases, the council might know about the unauthorised window replacement and begin enforcement action themselves – e.g. if it is a prominent building – but mostly it’s up to individuals / local groups / heritage bodies to make the complaint. It’s ridiculous, but sometimes a Prot. Struc. has PVC fitted and no one spots it or bothers to make a complaint, so they get away with it.
Thousands of buildings in this country should be Prot. Strucs. (or should be in ACAs) but are not, like the Mill Houses on the previous page, so that’s another problem: – they can be freely PVC’d.
Another situation where you might make a complaint is where an owner of a Prot. Struc. agreed to re-instate sash windows under the terms of a wider planning permission, but didn’t do it. I’ve just made a complaint on behalf of An Taisce for a Prot. Struc. at 9 Lower Liffey Street (The Lotts pub): – As part of their of planning permission for refurbishment & new building adjoining, they were to reinstate sashes, but the development is now complete for more than 6 months and the ’70s aluminium windows are still there. They’re trying to slither out of the extra couple of grand expenditure for new windows. That’s Ireland for you! :rolleyes:
The Court House portico & blank flank walls look incredible in the old B & W photo. Although it still looks great in the ‘now’ photographs, it seems a bit cluttered to the front.
It’s a nice link (although the description ‘link’ is undermined by the fact that one of the buildings it links is very good and the other is very crap).
More from I. I. property supplement on Friday:
These are being advertised (in a separate ad on the page) as “period homes” – that warrants a complaint to the advertising standards authority.
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Newly built? Well why is it for sale then? – some landowner fiddling the system.
The sales pitch reads like an An Bord Pleanala schedule for refusal of planning permission; ‘newly-built for sale’ (no occupancy clause); ‘dormer bungalow’ (obtrusive design); ‘elevated site’ (would have high visual impact on surrounding area)
So here’s the Dublin PVC-ing. Eh, enjoy, if that’s the word. The buildings are a pair of (unlisted) Georgian mill houses of circa 1820, situated at the entrance to the former Hibernian Mill on Inchicore Road, Kilmainham, which was recently converted to apartments, retaining the shell of the mill. The houses are not connected to the mill anymore (The Hibernian Mill is not to be confused with the more well known Kilmainham Mill on Kilmainham Lane, which also has an approved scheme for apartments). Anyway, this wretched job to the larger of the two houses resulted in the loss of a complete set of original Wyatt windows 😡 . An T (me, actually) had written to DCC shortly before this happened asking them to add the houses to the record of Protected Structures (they didn’t), so needless to say I was really 😡 when I saw this. The other house retains its sashes, but the Wyatts are not original – they’re modern replacements.
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Rear view: That’s the gothic-arch entrance to the Royal Hospital at the end of the road in the 1st pictuire. Original 8-over-8 sashes were replaced at the rear. And you can see from here that the slate roof has been replaced by those flat shiny tegral fake slates – complements the PVC anyway!
The most pathetic thing about the window replacement is the way the PVC has copied the pane-patterns of the sashes of various periods on the house; the Georgian sashes at the front and back; the Victorian margined sash in the front basement; and the 1-over-1 sash in the side (had security bars over it) – which anyway they got wrong & turned into a ‘2-over-2’ 😀 .
That Nolan Brophy website certainly says a lot. Actually, I’ll just post it again in case Sue missed it;
SUE CLICK HERE: http://www.nolan-brophy.com/html/new_dev.htm#DublinLimerick, yes, I know perfectly well it would normally be “Isn’tâ€. I use “Aren’t†as in “Aren’t they?†because the preponderance of, and positive coverage of, period-style development in the I. I. supplement clearly reflects the group of people who put it together, and to distinguish it from the main paper, who have some good writers like Treacy Hogan and John S. Doyle.
More than anything when I flick through the I. I. property supplement, I find it hard to believe it is 2005. It’s more like we’re in the first wave of ‘Georgian-style’ building of 20-30 years ago (popularised, inadvertently, by the Irish Georgian Society’s campaigns to save real Georgian architecture), except it’s much more sinister now because the sale of development land is a business/income in itself, & all the other reasons mentioned already. It was full of crap again today!
It was the sick phraseology like “stunningly elegant country housesâ€, the building company being called ‘Surestone’ (you wouldn’t find one piece of real stone on those houses), and the parallel ignorance of planning issues that really got me about that I. I. piece. Incidentally, there’s no name on the article, but the name on the top of the page is Valerie McGrath, so I presume it is by her. Hard to believe this piece to appeared in her own paper a few months ago: https://archiseek.com/content/showthread.php?t=3262
I know I’m stating the obvious here, but estates like ‘Carriglea’ are born out of a vicious circle of bad planning: – sprawl, one-off housing & its associated traffic generation reduce the liveability of urban centres, where the jobs are, resulting in the building of estates like this, supposedly ‘away from it all’. But, being car-dependent, they further reduce the liveability of urban centres & the area around them, generating more demand for estates and one-offs in quiet places. And so it goes on.…
@emf wrote:
Does anyone else get the feeling that the articles in the property supplements are, in most cases, just a re-hash of the developers/ auctioneers/ estate agents advertising blurbs??
Absolutely. You see this all the time in the various property supplements. But I’ve never seen it presented in such unashamed glowing tones as above.…you have to ask what kind of schmucks do the Irish Indo Property Supplement have writing for them?
Sue, the villages of Ireland are covered in these kind of mock-period estates tacked onto the edges of them…. As Phil said it’s what people want. But they result indirectly in destruction of real heritage, they don’t knit into the existing village structure, they are (to many) a visual blight and they are designed as car-dependent commuter housing to a town or city maybe 50 miles away, thus contributing to congestion, poor air quality and ozone-depleting emissions.
I’d say it had. That was done a lot to Georgian buildings; – removal of the first floor window pier and insertion of a fancy oriel window. There’s a lot of them around. But now some of them have had the oriel removed to reveal an ugly rectangle. Like this and the “Funland – Come in and See” building on Upper O’C St.
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Shaw’s directory of 1850 as discussed earlier showing the quay-end buildings on the west side of Westmoreland Street prior to the 1860s alterations that made them into the Ballast Office corner landmark. The only difference in the two buildings that became the landmark from the rest is that they were 3 bays, not 2.
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And – photographic proof – a circa 1860 photo from The Heart of Dublin showing the uniform parapet running up to the corner of Aston’s Quay.
I find this picture spooky – the sense of a continuous Georgian streetscape along Westmoreland Street, across the narrower hump-backed O’Connell Bridge and into O’Connell Street (different names then, of course) – with the larger mass of the circa 1840 Imperial Hotel/Clery’s in the distance.
And all the top hat people – wonder what kind of a day were they having?….
You can see that most of the WSCs granite shopfronts on the west side of the street had already been altered to bracketed timber types – after only about 50 years. The significance of D’Olier/Westmoreland Street as a piece of unified design must never have been highly regarded – strange.
But – I can’t get it in because it’s too close to the fold of the book – just out of the picture on the left, there’s an unaltered original on the Fleet St corner, where Coleman’s/Spar is now – however it seems to be gone by the 1920s picture posted on the previous page…
😀
Just to reply to one or two Q.s about Law Society bdg.:
The tower is indeed finished and magnificently shown in the Malton print – he was obviously privy to the drawings.
The drawing I posted of the tower is architect Ivory’s original drawing of it (from the rear), from a book about the building called New Lease of Life published by the Archit. Archive, which has loads of great photos & drawings of the building.
Must have a look around that Nat. Lib. Online Coll.
Lovely stuff! :rolleyes:
Collins Barracks Musuem also have PVC-coated inner windows facing into the square. Tut, tut. And it’s not like the traffic is roaring by outside…..I suppose they need them to help control temperature for the artefacts on show.
The inner windows I’m thinking of that should have been promoted here before would not be of PVC. Granted there would always be the problem of the relationship with the internal window lining….The Dundalk shopfront is lovely. Is it mostly original?
I don’t know Dundalk as well as I should….I’ve got a very-difficult-to-look-at before & after PVC-ing from Dublin coming up. I’ll post it in the next day or so.
Prepare your stomachs!! 🙂
Rocque’s map, 1756
I’m not religious but I think it’s fair to say that what was done to that graveyard and park was sacrilege and a piece of official cultural vandalism, not to mention the loss of a green space in the city, which are so thin on the ground….And it was part and parcel of St. Mary’s Church.
It wasn’t working, but it was a fine park – it just needed some larger openings in the railings – maybe one at each end of the Jervis Street side. The rounded coping stones on the railing plinth wall were quite beautiful.
At the time, An Taisce were outraged at what was done.The plight of the church itself in the last 2 decades is another Dublin heritage horror story. From The Heart of Dublin by Peter Pearson:
By the 1980s St. Mary’s, like so many other city-centre Church of Ireland churches, had almost no parishioners and was forced to close. The Representative Church Body, responsible for such church property, decided to sell it in 1987. In a blatantly commercial move, the church was advertised as a mere site, and the crypt was unceremoniously emptied of all its coffins and artefacts. The crumpled remains of fine lead coffins, many of them dating from the early 18th century and belonging to such noted people as the dukes of Ormonde, were flung on the back of a cart and taken away for scrap. This was the historic church where the playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan was baptised, along with Wolfe Tone and Sean O’Casey. It was the wedding venue of Benjamin Guinness and Ann Lee…..The church was initially acquired for commercial use as a paints and wallpaper shop..…Following the removal of all the original oak box pews and the loss of the entire carved reredos, it was also used by a voluntary arts group..…the proposal to turn it into a pub has resulted in the raising of the floor level by 3 feet.
That’s shocking Graham. Knowing it’s not allowed, they’ve just stuck it up there to see how many days or weeks they can get away with it for.
Thomond, why have you posted the image again, given that we’ve seen it in the previous post? :confused:
I’ve seen those inner glazing windows behind sashes you refer to MrX here and there in Dublin too – The Irish Times have them in their Georgian buildings on D’Olier Street. Needless to say, this is what should have been promoted and used on a large scale in Ireland years ago if people wanted the ‘airlock’ insulation effect, before the horrific PVC replacement blitz began.
Perhaps PVC does have its place – though its manufacture is an intensive chemical (and thus environmentally unfriendly) process.
Well spotted on the removed chimney stack on ‘The Wood Shop’ (above right), Graham – hadn’t noticed that myself. Chimneys are so important for punctuating roofscapes and giving visual demarcation between individual buildings – they should be maintained even if disused. Shame on New Ross Town Council for letting such unsympathetic alterations be carried out to these quayfront buildings, which are the ‘face’ of the town.
Interestingly, before it was PVC’d, the T. Bradley building (above left) had original sashes on the first floor and later, larger-paned sashes on the top floor.
New Ross has one of the highest survival rates of traditional shopfronts in any town in Ireland – there must be upwards of 50 in basically intact condition in the central streets of the town. The Wood Shop front is a beautiful fluted, Ionic-columned design – but looks pretty poor now that it’s been sanitised by the building next door. The curtain in the window display when a shop ceases to trade is a charming country town feature – but it’s seen less and less now.
Also, the old timber-boarded vehicle underpass doors in the earlier pictures of this building have been replaced by a sheet metal gate by ‘04 – not exactly traditional :rolleyes: . Ok, this is a minor enough change, but the loss of historic sash windows is grievous.
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Anyway, enough about New Ross. It’s happening all over the country all the time. This is an old pub in Portarlington in 2003 (top) and 2004 (above). A recent change of ownership meant the removal of the nice ‘P. Finlay’ lettering across the top – which harmonised with the pubfront and 1st floor window architrave detailing – and, more seriously, the replacement of the painted sash windows with open-out stained timber windows – almost just as visually damaging as PVC (sounds like the same situation as the Step Inn in Stepaside, mentioned earlier in the thread).
@Graham Hickey wrote:
As for the view across the quay – one dreads to think what it looks like now with that yoke thrown in in place of what was the most charming of all buildings in that terrace.
As you probably noticed Graham, it had a central chimney stack, which is unusual. That and the small window proportions indicate a very early building, possibly of the late-17th or early-18th century. And quayfront buildings like this have a vital townscape role. I just don’t know what Town Councils are doing in granting demolitions for stuff like this…
And yes, the hierarchy of importance of the 1st floor windows over the floors above as reflected in the selective 19th century replacement of sashes in the building on the right, just like the in Sick & Indigent Roomkeeper’s Society building in Dublin – it makes their destruction and replacement with PVC even more savage….
The ACAs really do need to happen as a matter of urgency….
NEW ROSS
I was going to put these pictures on the ‘Beautiful’ (towns) thread, but they may as well go here.
I was in New Ross in 2002 and thought the Quay was very charming with its stone grain stores and terraced houses, especially this group (first picture above), with their intact 19th century timber shopfronts & sash windows. I thought the Council & townspeople must be aware of their value & are carefully maintaining the buildings’ character. Was back there again last summer (above picture) and the building on the right has had brown PVC windows and has been painted yellow to look like the one next door, upsetting the vertical-sub-division-of-buildings effect. The ‘T. Bradley’ building has also been PVC’d, and the red-painted building in the first picture appears to have been demolished & replaced by some mock-traditional shite with a roof pitch not-in-keeping with the terrace.
View of the Quay, New Ross, from across the River Barrow.
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Then on the Main Street behind the Quay – a cute little shop building in need of repair and restoration in 2002 (left). By ’04 (right) the shop is in use again but its Wyatt sash windows have been replaced by the unmentionable white plastic.
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Again on the Main Street – a sweet little former pub with period architectural features intact in ’02 (left). But by last summer (right) the dirty deed has been done….
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It is just horrible that this is happening all the time. Since the Planning & Development Act 2000, there is better legislative protection for historic buildings and areas, but we’re still in the ‘kick in’ period. Not all of these terraced buildings in our towns (like the ones above) are fit to be ‘Protected Structures’. But, because of its great unity and quality, a town like New Ross (and many others like it) will need to be designated as an ‘Architectural Conservation Area’ in the coming years – and so will begin the slow process of reinstating sash windows and other inappropriately replaced period features….all this PVC-ing will have been a big waste!!! 😮
In the meantime, heaps of beautiful hand-crafted historic joinery and sparkling old glass has been/will continue to be destroyed. 😡
New Ross is probably my favourite Irish town. It has an amazing urban coherence; the quay with its mix of shop-houses and grain stores, and the four streets behind that centred on the town hall. And the picturesque old shopfronts running up the incredibly steep hill of Mary Street.
But like so many, it’s undervalued and overrun with traffic, and it’s suffering non-stop loss of architectural character (the usual PVC-ing etc.). Tragic to see this in such a beautiful place.
I think it’s just seen as somewhere on the way to Waterford from Wexford.
St. George’s
The loss of St. George’s planned context of Georgian houses – its (near) axial street and crescent to the front – was sad. But at least the replacement ‘50s flats approximately replicated the original planning design. The flats are not bad architecturally, but they’ve been ruined by fat ugly shiny white PVC windows. Dublin Corporation, as they were then, went on a huge programme in the mid/late ‘90s of PVC-ing all their flats throughout the city centre, including architecturally important ones like those on Sandwith/Townsend St. I don’t think that would even happen now, ten years later – I think sustainable timber would be the only option (for timber).Law Society building
Another sad loss of formal Georgian setting was Blackhall Street (top), which led to the Law Society building, formerly the Blue Coat School, on Blackhall Place (Graham’s photo of St. George’s original setting is reposted for reference). Unlike Hardwicke Street/Hardwicke Place, this street has been fairly comprehensively mucked-up by three different stlyes and periods of council housing.The Law Society building was originally to have had a nice tower (above), but it was never completed for lack of funds.
It was a nice day last Wednesday when I was at the Dundrum centre. There were good views of the purple-y mountains, there were no tracksuits in the place like there are in every other centre and, as they are saying on boards.ie, “it’s a great place to see tottyâ€.
True, the inside is just like every other shopping centre. But I still maintain it integrates well with older Dundrum. This is quite marked when you come in from the Balally end (the recommended Luas stop for the centre), which is just the usual Irish shopping centre experience of walking across a large tarmac-ed area and going into a hole in the bottom of a huge brick wall (or other shit building)…….so that when you come out the front of the centre, you are (at least I was) pleasantly taken aback at the pubic space – if it seems a little cluttered it’s probably because the old Mill Pond had to be incorporated – connecting into the main street.
The first house on the main street is like a timewarp – two stories with slate roof & sash windows, you can nearly see the sacred heart on the wall in the tiny rooms inside – but there are architects or surveyors in there, fiddling with drawings. It’s an out office for the centre – how sweet.
Since the bypass opened, the main street is a revelation – it’s a street again. It had been choked with traffic all day every day for as long as I can remember.
But so what if the ‘main passages of the centre seem very dull’? The place has a tighter urban feel than Newbridge Shopping Centre. And there’s more to come I believe, outside, in the form of the European “network of streets and spaces†staple, which the others don’t have.
