Sir, – In his wonderful book Dublin 1660-1860 Maurice Craig suggests that Broadstone station is "the last building in Dublin to partake of the sublime. It stands on rising ground and the traveller who sees it for the first time, so unexpected in its massive amplitude, feels a little as he might if he were to stumble unawares upon the monstrous silences of Karnak or Luxor".
Sadly, for the half century or so that I have lived in the Broadstone area, that majestic panorama has been obscured by several nondescript buildings, surface car-parking and a petrol station.
So when the extensive excavation works for the Broadstone-DIT Luas station commenced, I had hoped that once again John Skipton Mulvany’s architectural masterpiece would be fully exposed to public view.
Sadly however the engineers, in their wisdom, have erected a brutal mass-concrete wall across the facade of the “great pylon-like block of the main building”, thus obscuring much of the ground floor.
A slap in the face of the sublime!
It is not as if we are inundated with buildings that as Craig states “in purely architectural terms it is hard to praise it [Broadstone station] too highly,” that we can afford to surround this particular architectural gem with such insensitive development.
– Yours, etc,
ROBERT BALLAGH
Broadstone,
Dublin 7.