City Hall shines again

The City Hall on Cork Hill used to be a gloomy old place. Its Portland stone facade was stained grey and even blackened by decades of urban smog. Inside, it reeked of dull and unimaginative municipal administration, its architectural unity sacrificed for a warren of offices and storerooms.

From next Thursday, for the first time since it was re-ordered by Dublin Corporation in 1852, visitors will be able to appreciate the stunning sense of space within the original building as it was designed by Thomas Cooley in 1769. For the Royal Exchange has been re-born in spectacular style.

The inside of this edifice possesses beauties that cannot be clearly expressed in words, as a contemporary commentator wrote not long after the building's completion in 1779. He described it as "spacious, lofty and noble - enriched in the most splendid manner" - and that is unquestionably true.

Dublin's merchants spared no expense when they decided to abandon trading stocks and shares in the Tholsel on Skinners Row, "amidst a concourse of the meanest and most vicious people" (riff-raff, in other words), and to "withdraw ourselves to a clean, comfortable and convenient building".

And so, the Royal Exchange was built on the site of St Mary le Dam, on Cork Hill. Unfortunately, because the site is so tight, it could not be aligned precisely on the axis of Parliament Street, created just 10 years earlier by the Wide Streets Commissioners. That's why it appears off-kilter, viewed from Capel Street.

But according to Paul Arnold, the consultant architect for its renovation, Cooley's great building represents "the ne plus ultra of neo-classical architecture in Dublin". It pre-dates the Four Courts and the Custom House, whose architect, James Gandon, was beaten by Cooley in the Royal Exchange competition.

What makes the City Hall even more important now is that, stripped of mid-19th-century internal walls, its interior is once more intact. Sadly, for reasons that are well-known, the interiors of both the Four Courts and the Custom House largely date from their reconstruction in the 1920s by the impoverished Free State.

The idea of reinstating Cooley's design first arose after the City Manager's department and the City Archives finally moved out in 1995. It was not something that needed to be done, but the Corporation decided to seize this opportunity to undo the damage inflicted on the building and repay a debt to history.

All traces of the former City Manager's office, where Frank Feely held court for 17 years, are gone. Even the south-facing windows that looked towards Dublin Castle have been blocked up with new Portland stone from the same quarry in Dorset that Cooley used; like the internal walls, they were Victorian insertions.

Conversely, the three original east-facing windows have been fully reinstated, using a painting from 1837 as a guide. Seven panes wide, with their sashes arranged as 24 over 18, these magnificent windows must be the largest in Georgian Dublin; the morning light they let in illuminates the entire ground floor.

But the architects have not been entirely ruthless. The three great doors facing Parliament Street and a similarly impressive trio on the west front have been retained. So have, perhaps inevitably, the rather poor frescoes around the base of the dome, depicting scenes from the history of Dublin and the four provincial crests.

"When you're dealing with a building like this, you have to be very respectful," says Ronan Boylan of the City Architect's Department, who has overseen the latest works. He believes that even those who carried out the re-ordering of the Royal Exchange in 1852 were "conscious that at some stage it should be undone".

But even so, damage was done. Delicate neo-classical plasterwork on the ceiling beams had to be repaired by stuccadores Andrew Smith and Sean Henderson. Similarly, alterations to the pair of cantilevered Portland staircases, which involved the insertion of cast iron treads, had to be removed to restore their integrity.

Boylan generously credits Paul Arnold with the inspired idea of repainting all the windows and doors in deep charcoal grey so that, when seen from a distance, the building reads like an 18th-century elevational drawing; the opes are dark voids in the solid mass of gleaming white and richly detailed Portland stone.

The balustrade, too, has been retained - even though it dates from 1874. (Its predecessor, somewhat lower and less chunky, had collapsed during a public whipping 60 years earlier when several people in the crowd were killed.) The eastern end of the balustrade, which had been sinking, was taken down and seamlessly rebuilt.

There was also the usual problem with expanding metal clamps in the stonework, particularly at parapet level, as well as significant defects in some of the large spanning stones. All the joints had to be raked out and re-pointed in lime mortar while "a whole bag of tricks", as Arnold calls it, was used to clean the entire exterior.

"This is the finest stonework in the city; the joints are immaculate, the masonry wonderful," he says. "There was no question of coming in and sand-blasting it all." This caution has left some of the interior stonework, still drying out after layers of paint were peeled off, looking rather blotchy; it can be cleaned in the future.

Reinstatement of the ground floor meant getting rid of the south staircase, inserted in 1852. But before that could happen, the architects had to show that its removal would not create a safety hazard in the event of fire. So they lit a fire in the middle of the rotunda, with city fire chiefs and a fire tender on hand to observe it.

What they demonstrated was that the dome would act as a smoke reservoir for long enough to allow people to get out of the building if it went on fire. Not only did this exercise permit the removal of the south staircase, it also allowed the matching stone staircases on the north front to be kept open, with no need for fire screens.

A new circular lift-shaft serving all floors was installed to make the newly-renovated City Hall fully accessible. Inserted into the area circumscribed by one of the staircases, this transparent tube is relatively unobtrusive and looks fine within the main space. Part of the old city wall was discovered in excavating its base.

The 19th-century marble floor of the rotunda has been retained. New floors around the ambulatory are done in Portland, laid in a diagonal pattern, with square inserts in English red sandstone. Above, the dome has been re-gilded and provided with discreet uplighters while the ambulatory is lit by nine new brass lanterns.

Downstairs in the vaulted basement, gathered around its amazing mushroom-like central pier, a multi-media exhibition, Dublin's City Hall - The Story of the Capital, features many of the city's treasures, including the Great Sword given by Henry IV, as well as recounting key events in the city's history, right up to the present.

The Corporation has even been magnanimous enough to include a large photograph of the "Save Wood Quay" march wending its way through the streets in September 1978 to protest against the planned Civic Offices, as well as a quite damning quote from my own book, The Destruction of Dublin, published in 1985.

There is one glaring omission - not a single picture of the Duke of Ormonde, who made such an impact on the development of Dublin by building the Royal Hospital, enclosing the Phoenix Park and initiating the monumental task of laying out the Liffey Quays. But this oversight will no doubt be put right as the exhibition evolves.

The gargantuan statue of Daniel O'Connell should also be moved back outside to re-occupy the vacant pedestal made for it. In the meantime, Dublin has re-acquired a lost treasure in the renovated City Hall, and everyone involved in this u4.5 £4.5 million project, including contractors Dunwoody and Dobson, are entitled to take a bow.

The fact that it was all done "just for the joy of it", in Paul Arnold's phrase, shows how far we have come since the dark days of municipal parsimony, when something as dramatic as this could never have been contemplated. It is truly a metaphor for the "can do" attitude that now seems to pervade the Civic Offices at Wood Quay.