The sublime obscured – An Irishman’s Diary on the once great vista of Broadstone Station

The late great Maurice Craig described Broadstone Station as "the last building in Dublin to partake of the sublime," in his classic book Dublin 1660-1860. "The traveller who sees it for the first time, so unexpected in its in its massive amplitude, feels a little as he might if he were to stumble unawares upon the monstrous silences of Karnak or Luxor."

Designed by John Skipton Mulvany for the Midland Great Western Railway company and built during the Great Famine, the station saw its last train – a night mail from Westport – arriving at midnight on January 16th, 1937. Since then, the grandest of Dublin’s stations has been used as a bus depot and makeshift headquarters of Bus Éireann.

The building all but disappeared behind a Maxol filling station and Marian shrine on Phibsborough Road, several advertising hoardings and a pair of red-brick houses built right on its forecourt in about 1900.

For decades, the great station front and colonnade at the side became almost invisible from Constitution Hill, despite standing on high ground.

‘Magnificent vista’

Twenty years ago, I wrote a piece in

The Irish Times

about how residents of the area, flushed with the success of a campaign to restore Blessington Street Basin as a public amenity, had turned their attention to the old railway station, with the aim of restoring “the magnificent vista of Broadstone”, as local historian Gerry Crowley said at the time.

This being Dublin, nothing happened until the Luas Cross City project came along with plans for a stop right in front of the station to serve the emerging campus of Dublin Institute of Technology in the grounds of Grangegorman.

Now, finally, there was an unrivalled opportunity to undo all the damage done over the years to the once great vista of Broadstone.

Hoardings

The Maxol filling station was purchased and demolished, the advertising hoardings disappeared and the two incongruous houses were also pulled down; only the Marian shrine survives. As construction work proceeded, something terrible happened: a solid concrete retaining wall and parapet were built in front of Broadstone, cutting off the lower part of its facade.

Artist Robert Ballagh, who lives nearby, told me he was in communication with the Luas project team “for the past four years”, seeking to establish the treatment they were planning for Broadstone. And now he’s appalled by what they’ve done. “Why couldn’t they have put in a set of railings? After all, that was done centuries ago to show off the King’s Inns.”

Green Party councillor Ciarán Cuffe, a former minister of state for planning, is also on the case. “It seems to me that some of the worst aspects of this rather sheer and brutal wall could be mitigated if the upper part of the wall were replaced by carefully designed transparent vertical railings at the top 1200mm section,” he recently told the Luas project team.

They responded by pointing out that the parapet was needed for “public safety reasons”, to prevent vehicles using the space in front of the Broadstone building from falling onto the Luas stop area below. This arises because the “public space” in question is being used as a car park by Bus Éireann staff. The finished wall is to be clad in “panels of white limestone”.

But Cllr Cuffe said this was unsatisfactory and redolent of the insensitivity of the Loop Line bridge’s relationship with the Custom House. “It is my strong view that this [the solid parapet treatment] should be reconsidered in favour of a lighter structure. There are numerous examples from elsewhere as to how this could be designed appropriately,” he declared.

According to the Luas project team, railings and glass panels “were considered at an earlier stage in the design of the wall, but due to the requirement to protect against vehicular impact a road barrier (or some other solid object) would need to have been placed between the railing and the public space” in front of Broadstone.

So that’s where things stand at the moment.

Solution

It is inconceivable that an alternative solution cannot be found. If the area in front of the old station was not used any longer for car parking and became instead a genuine public space, either a fine set of wrought-iron railings or a glazed balustrade 1.2m high would be perfectly adequate, giving a clear view of the “sublime” facade of the old Broadstone Station.