Bus Eireann Broadstone, Broadstone, Constitution Hill, Dublin 7, Co. Dublin

The granite façade at Broadstone, with its tapered pilasters, anthemion motifs and heavy cornice, belongs to a style architects called neo-Egyptian, a nineteenth-century fashion for borrowing the massing and motifs of ancient Egyptian architecture to lend new buildings an air of permanence and gravity. Nothing about the exterior suggests its current life as a bus depot, and that mismatch between form and function is what makes the place worth a second look.

The building dates to 1850 and was built as the Dublin terminus of the Midland & Great Western Railway, a company set up to compete with the Great Southern & Western Railway for traffic to the west of Ireland. Its architect, John Skipton Mulvaney, faced the structure in granite quarried at Ballyknockan and gave it a position overlooking the harbour of the Royal Canal at Broadstone, so that the building originally had water as well as rail traffic passing beneath it. What stands at the front is not, strictly speaking, a station entrance at all. It was known as the Director's House, housing the company's offices rather than serving as a public gateway to the train shed behind, which explains why so much architectural ambition, pedimented breakfronts, carved wreaths, an inscribed date panel, went into a building most passengers would never have needed to enter. Grand neo-classical treatments of this kind were common in early railway architecture generally, a deliberate strategy to dress up an unfamiliar technology in the borrowed authority of established civic buildings, reassuring a public still uncertain about steam travel.

Inside, the entrance hall rises through three storeys to a coffered, top-lit ceiling with a ribbed glazed dome, an unexpectedly theatrical space for what was, in effect, an administrative block. Doric columns and pilasters carry a first-floor gallery edged with a foliate cast-iron balustrade, while a cast-iron staircase with its own foliate ironwork leads up past pedimented doorcases carved with consoles. To the rear, the double-pile train shed retains its M-profile roofline and an Ionic colonnaded screen along its eastern side, a reminder that the working railway architecture continued well behind the ornamental front the public actually saw. The building no longer performs its original function, but as an early and unusually elaborate example of Irish railway architecture it remains a distinctive fragment of the country's industrial past, hiding in plain sight behind a fleet of parked buses.