PUBS:The Irish pub may be more than the sum of its parts, but gathering and selling those parts to replica Irish drinking houses around the world continues to be a lucrative business, writes Michael Freeman
The warehouse we pull up to is slightly dilapidated, made of corrugated iron and spotted with rust around the eaves. It stands on a concrete apron in the middle of a Louth field, surrounded by a row of truck cabs in various states of decay.
Through a small sheet-metal door, I'm standing in a room filled, to a level far above head height, with the kind of assorted memorabilia beloved of owners of old-fashioned-pubs everywhere. To my right is an entire wall of cabinets stacked with ancient consumables - boxes of candles, packets of soap, tins of custard and "shoe segs" - all emblazoned with the names of their long-forgotten manufacturers. To my left are shelves of large ceramic figurines, including a group of smiling black musicians in bright uniforms that bring the word "minstrel" uncomfortably to mind. Farther on is a rack of dusty sports trophies. At my feet are assorted battered leather items and a few pairs of ageing ice-skates. And towards the back are row after row of enamel advertisements, rusty road signs, and mirrors decorated with now-defunct brands of whiskey.
In short, it's the sort of thing you probably see above the bar and stacked in the corner cabinets of your local. But this is the mother lode. In fact, the chances are that this is where your local got it from. I've been brought here by John Heverin, managing director of Ól Irish Pubs Limited - a Dublin company that designs and builds, well, old Irish pubs, from Stoneybatter to Sacramento - who is showing me exactly what goes into the design of a traditional pub. His company's collection of bric-a-brac, as it's known in the trade, is the largest in Ireland. Heverin introduces me to Chas McLaughlin, the man in charge of sourcing this vast repository of valuable junk. I tell him I've never seen anything like it. "No?" he says. "This is only the overflow store. I'll show you the proper one now."
Earlier that morning, I'd gone to meet Heverin at his company's offices in Blanchardstown. The first thing he did was give me a set of blueprints for the next project, a large pub in the US. The drawings showed every detail of the building - from the Victorian-effect tiling on the floor to the smoked and aged wood that will be used in the bar fittings. I ask the company architect, Eamon Cullen, what exactly they offer to clients wishing to build a traditional pub from scratch. "We offer us," he answers. "And what we can do. Which is the whole interior fit-out, including exterior shopfronts. Furniture, flooring, joinery, glasswork, painting, ceiling details, all the bric-a-brac, the knick-knacks. Everything that you touch and see."
Considerable effort goes into achieving the semblance of a place that's been there for a long time. Heverin mentions a Dublin pub recently refitted by his company, who, he says, refused to pay for him to age the fresh paintwork. "It looks new, and that defeats the purpose of it. It was different previously - with smoking, it would age in five years. Whereas now, with the ban, it could take 30 years. Where's the dirt and grime going to come from?"
One option is simply to install it. "Timberwork can be smoked and aged down and blended in with crackled paintwork. Floors get beaten up and aged. Bar cabinets can be aged before they're put in. It should look old."
Heverin and Cullen say they can design and build a complete old-fashioned pub in 16 weeks. The on-site construction itself takes only two. Why? "It's all done. It's flat packed. This bar has been fully assembled in the warehouse in Wexford, taken apart, wrapped and transported." Heverin later tells me that they once installed a complete traditional Irish pub on a cruise liner during its 10-day maiden voyage between Venice and Rotterdam: "A storm bought us two extra days."
Despite this speedy construction, Heverin and Eamon say that each pub they build is carefully designed for its own particular location and target market. And Heverin notes that, although most of their business is in the US, they don't push the Irish angle too hard. "Of course it's Irish, but it's not blatant, bling-bling, shamrocks and tricolours." The Irishness of a really well-designed pub, he suggests, should be more subtle. "It's all in the bric-a-brac. All in the memorabilia."
And so to the warehouse. McLaughlin leads me through bay after bay crammed high with ageing, dusty oddments. It's like being in a giant props department for the licensed-premises industry. There are racks and racks of copper pots, pharmaceutical instruments and assorted household goods. An area the size of the average living room is filled with ancient bottles of varying shapes and sizes, an unsurprising proportion of which still carry faded Guinness labels. More esoteric items include a stuffed beaver and a large piece of furniture which I'm fairly confident in calling a vaulting horse. A doorway leads through into a paradise of battered tobacco tins. Where does it all come from?
"It comes from everywhere," says McLaughlin. "There's antiques fairs that you go to, and there's car boot sales as well. For the bigger stuff, you go to auctions." The masonry jars are "dug out of Victorian dumps". Things "turn up in batches at old chemist's shops, the cough syrup bottles and stuff like that." Of the tobacco tins, he says, "you might come across a hundred of these at a time" - because people use them for storing nuts and bolts in, apparently. "You go up the country," adds Heverin, "any county you want, and start going into sheds. They're full of it still."
But surely, I say, at this stage there must be only a finite amount of this old stuff remaining in the country. Is it not getting scarce? "The really good old advertising is getting harder to get," says McLaughlin. "If I could buy original pub mirrors I could probably sell 50 of them tomorrow. But you might get only two or three in a month, if you're lucky. But this kind of stuff here" - he gestures at a huge pile of antiquated confectionery tins - "there's usually enough to go around."
Pub mirrors seem to be the Fabergé eggs of the bric-a-brac world. For a rare original, Heverin suggests, you might pay €20,000. So most of the ones you see are reproductions. ("We use a studio in Castlebellingham.") Old cast-iron road signs, too, are increasingly difficult to lay hands on - though Ól Irish Pubs can get you a new one manufactured to specification by the same people who make the real, Gay Byrne-approved road signs. "If they're in the US," says McLaughlin, "they want them saying 3,070 miles to Cobh, or St James' Gate".
Other than that, almost all of the bric-a-brac is genuine; although tinned goods are relatively easy to replicate. "We would reproduce some," McLaughlin says, pausing in front of a large display. "I've made these. And these. And the bottom one of those three. This is real, this is repro. Real, real, repro, real."
Another doorway leads through into a room populated by musical instruments, along with a number of large ceramic devices, on one of which I read the legend "Bed and Douche Pan". McLaughlin enumerates them: "Accordions, banjos, ukeleles, some guitars. Bodhráns are the biggest sellers." But I'm more interested in some rusty bits of metal, carefully stored in a bucket on the floor. Can they really be a suit of armour? Yes they can. "I wouldn't imagine it's real, but if it isn't, it's quite good reproduction." Some of the bric-a-brac is more recent: a mannequin wears an Italia '90 T-shirt. And I find, incongruously, an orange plastic lobster. "That," says Heverin, "would look good in a lobster pot."
The website of Ól Irish Pubs offers six styles of traditional pub design, ranging from Country Pub to High End Victorian. But Heverin is at pains to point out that these categories are really there to alert potential customers to a range of possibilities; each pub they build is designed for its particular town, building and clientele. The memorabilia - on which the company quote prices per "linear metre" of shelving that needs to be filled - is also carefully tailored to its specific location. The secret, he says, is in making a connection to the local history of the area - however distant from Irish influence that history might seem. "Every bar we've done is tailored to the area, what their industry was. In Arizona, the local history was all about mining. So our bric-a-brac showed how the Irish used to do all the mining and build the tunnels in England." For a bar in New York, it would be "the Statue of Liberty, and passports, and the Titanic". And, he adds, "in Lake Tahoe, we got the memorabilia from a fishing team."
"The standard themes are here," says McLaughlin. "If anybody wants to do a shop theme, a pub theme, a country cottage theme, an agricultural theme, or a Victorian theme - they're all standards, we hold that as standard all the time. But then there's the specialist ones. In the last year, we've done post office, draper's shop, clock store." He pauses. "Jewellery," adds Heverin, "forge".
So you'd be able to source the memorabilia for any theme I wanted? "Oh yeah. You'd need time on it. Unless you've got a really big budget, in which case we can do it really quickly. If you're looking for stuff in a rush, it's always more expensive. If you say to me, 'We're doing a pigeon fancier's club, and we're shipping it out next month' - that's a real rush. But if you give it a year . . ." My mind wanders on the possibilities.
After showing me the largest collection of vintage enamel advertising in the country, McLaughlin and Heverin suggest that we have lunch at a local pub run by a friend of his, who is, they say, a serious collector of memorabilia. So it proves: barely an inch of wall is visible between the whiskey-branded mirrors (genuine this time, says Heverin) and iron signs. The ceiling is hung thick with bedwarmers and farming implements. It has a slightly hallucinatory quality, like being in 10 normal pubs somehow compressed into one. The previous week, McLaughlin says, thieves had broken in and set to one of the antique shop tills, seemingly in the belief that it might contain cash.
He leads me on a brief tour of the premises, stopping to point out the things that he sold the owner. In the corridor by the toilets is a large wooden display cabinet that was reclaimed from a grocer's shop. It is now full of biscuits, which seem to be for display purposes only. I ask him how they are preserved. "They aren't", says McLaughlin. "We put them in the oven a little while. But they've been there five years now. I'm surprised they haven't needed replacing."
The last room they show me in the warehouse is the "salvage room". It's where they put the big things - furniture and fittings reclaimed from pubs that have closed or are being done up, and destined for a new life in a more exotic location. At the centre of the room, amid stacks of tables and chairs and the odd bit of stained glass, stands an entire bar. It's odd seeing it out of its natural setting - like suddenly coming across someone's living room in the frozen-food aisle. I ask where it's from. "Oh, that came out of the Corner House in Clane," says McLaughlin. "And I think it's going to Philadelphia. Last I heard."
One of the largest pieces in the room is a prize fish, crudely made from papier maché and fixed to a board, with its weight and the name of its catcher underneath. It leans forlornly against the breezeblock wall. "That's not a real fish," I point out, unnecessarily. Heverin looks at it. "You say that now, but if it's up 15 feet in the air, surrounded by nets and baskets - how would you know?"