Connolly Station, Amiens Street, Dublin, Co. Dublin
Co. Dublin |
Railway Stations
Travellers hurrying through Connolly Station rarely notice that they have passed from one building into another, but tucked against the northwest side of the great trainshed sits a smaller, self-contained terminus that once had its own booking office, parcels office, cloakroom and waiting rooms, entirely separate from the grander structure beside it.
Twenty bays long and only a single storey high, it is easy to overlook precisely because it was designed to be modest, its stepped façade and quiet brickwork deferring to the more theatrical station it adjoins.
The building was constructed around 1891 by the engineer W.H. Mills as the Dublin terminus of the City of Dublin Junction Railway, a company formed for a specific and rather bureaucratic purpose: linking the Great Northern Railway with the Dublin Wicklow and Wexford Railway so that mail arriving from Britain could move across the city and onward without delay, completing a chain in the Royal Mail route. That practical origin explains the building's restraint. Where the main Connolly Station trainshed makes a statement, this addition simply works, though it shares the same materials and craftsmanship, cast-iron fluted columns with moulded necks and bases, bow-string arches carrying lattice spandrels, and brick walls laid in Flemish bond. Ten gable-fronted paired bays step down along the southwest end of the façade, each topped with a hipped slate roof that gives way at the front to glazed hipped roofing supported on steel girders and trusses. Decorative ironwork panels incorporate mouchettes, a pointed leaf-shaped motif borrowed from Gothic tracery, flanking round oculi pierced with multifoil openings, a small flourish of ornament in an otherwise practical structure.
Look closely at the details rather than the overall form: the round-headed window openings retain their two-over-two pane timber sliding sashes, some panes painted, one opening fitted with glass blocks instead of glazing; the brick cornice runs continuously at impost level, forming a hood-moulding over doors and windows alike; and a curved verandah with battened timber panelling still shelters part of the platform. A hallway at the southern end, its walls arcaded in brick, leads up three steps into the main trainshed, marking the physical seam between this quieter terminus and the station most people think of when they name Connolly.
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