Heuston Station, Saint Johns Road West , Dublin 8, Co. Dublin

This separation between show and function was typical of railway architecture of the period, and it means that the imposing portico facing Saint John's Road West serves largely as a formal gesture, a piece of civic theatre denoting an entrance while the actual business of ticketing and travel unfolded in rooms set apart from it.

The booking hall and restaurant date to around 1845, forming the centrepiece of a long range of offices to the south of the train shed at what was then the terminus of the Great Southern and Western Railway. The central hall rises through a double height beneath a hipped roof concealed behind a rendered parapet, its granite piers and carved granite entablature giving the exterior a weight that borrows freely from classical precedent. Inside, the same classical language continues: a coffered ceiling, bracketed cornice, and clerestory fanlights sit above plastered walls treated with a blind arcade, while round headed arcades echo, on a smaller scale, the great arches of the train shed itself. The rear elevation, forming the southern wall of the train shed's interior, repeats these round headed openings with hood mouldings, tying the passenger spaces visually to the working railway beyond. Screens of elliptical arched openings flanked by segmental heads, divided by panelled pilasters, further link the booking hall to the train shed on one side and to the restaurant on the other, with a corridor behind one such screen once providing access between train shed, booking hall, and toilets.

The portico itself repays a slow look. Its round arcade, framed by carved architrave surrounds and engaged columns, carries panelled beams on scrolled consoles, and the main doorway beneath is treated with the same care, a round headed opening with channelled voussoirs resting on scrolled consoles, a fanlight above, and a double leaf timber panelled door. Many of the nine over six pane timber sash windows survive along the front, some blocked over time, some still fitted with cast iron railings and granite sills capped in brass. The restaurant, once part of this composition, is no longer in use, but its screen to the west, with matching elliptical and segmental arched openings, remains part of the sequence of spaces that made this end of the station one continuous, carefully ordered classical statement rather than a mere point of departure.