CIÉ Goods Depot, 48-57, North Wall Quay, Dublin 1, Co. Dublin

Yet that is precisely what happened to this former North Wall Railway Station, a structure whose grand symmetrical façade, all rusticated quoins and Doric piers, was designed for passengers who were, in the end, almost an afterthought.

The building dates from around 1900 and was raised primarily to complete the postal link between London and Dublin, with the movement of mail taking priority over the comfort of travellers. That secondary passenger function acquired a darker weight during the First World War, when soldiers serving with the British Army passed through the station on their way to board the troop ships bound for the front. Once the war ended and that grim traffic ceased, the building's role shifted again: it was converted to freight handling and later became the administrative headquarters of the rail company that operated it. The central block's unrealised clock parapet, with its inverted scrolled console brackets and pedimented faces, is a small monument to plans that were never quite finished, an architectural gesture left hanging between one use and the next.

What survives today is remarkably complete for a building that has passed through so many functions. The English-bond brickwork, granite plinth course and cast-iron downpipes remain largely as built, and the interior still holds its exposed timber truss roofs and some of the original glazed screens and tiled floors. Now in temporary mixed commercial use and partially vacant, it forms part of what is recognised as the last surviving nineteenth-century group of buildings to the east of George's Dock, a rare pocket of Dublin's port-era streetscape that has otherwise been swept away by redevelopment.