CITY QUAY DUBLIN DOCKLANDS
CITY QUAY HOSTS A NUMBER OF INTERESTING BUILDINGS
City Quay is short but it features a number of interesting buildings in including a well know church. At 13-18 is a new, nine-storey, headquarters style, flexible office building bounded by City Quay, Princess Street South, Gloucester Street, and St Mary’s Church in Dublin 2. With a discernible presence along the South Quay, 13-18 City Quay is a landmark addition to Dublin’s skyline. The eight-storey-over-basement block of 10,960sq is one of the largest in the docklands and is the new flagship headquarters for Grant Thornton.
I visited the Grant Thornton building earlier in the year and the view from the top floor is amazing and surprising as I was able to seen much more of the city than I thought possible.
The colourful building is City Quay National School which is now a co-educational primary school educating around 160 children in Dublin’s south inner city. They teach children from Junior Infants to 6th Class. The school is under the patronage of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. In 1974 it was decided that City Quay Boys School and Townsend Street Girls School should amalgamate. A new school was constructed in the site of the old Boys School, which was originally built in the late 19th century. This project was co-funded by the Department of Education and The Mercy Sisters. The school, as we know it today, opened its doors on September 1st 1977. Today the school continues to be a vibrant place where local and international pupils are welcomed and valued.
Built originally as a chapel of ease to St. Andrews, Westland Row, the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary became a parish church in 1908. Built to a design by John Bourke, who worked on several churches throughout the country. The spire was added, to design by John Loftus Robinson, in 1890. It became known as the Docker's Church, catering for the seamen and dockers working on the adjacent City Quay. Numerous decorative details enliven its simple form, including the mosaic representing the Immaculate Heart, Star of the Sea, set in a decorative frame over the main entrance. To the interior, a Calvary scene reputedly made by William Pearse adds artistic interest, as does a mosaic which may have been designed by Arthur Gibney. Stained glass and carved timber and marble fittings are characteristically ecclesiastic elements. The church's neo-Gothic style was typical of Catholic church design in the later nineteenth century. With the adjoining presbytery (50020337) and gate screen (50020338, it forms part of an interesting group of church related structures.
CityArts in Dublin is a community arts organization founded in 1973. in 1988, there was a name change from Grapevine Arts Centre to City Arts Centre when the organisation occupied a warehouse building on the cornet of City Quay and Moss Street near Tara Street Station, then the largest centre of its kind in Ireland. U2 provided fully equipped rehearsal spaces for young bands in the basement. Over this was a cafe and theatre space initially run by Declan Gorman and above that a gallery space initially run by Tommy Weir. Sandy Fitzgerald continued as Director through to 2001. The Arts Council never fully backed the centre favouring the highly regarded Project Arts Centre, despite the City Arts Centre clear leadership profile for community arts.
The Centre actually owned this building, having bought it in a then run-down area. However, the property become valuable. There was an opportunity to create a large civic project, when a partnership between City Quay School to the rear of the centre and a community hall adjacent to the centre were brought into a scheme for an innovative socio/cultural project at the entrance to the docklands, then at the beginning of its transformation. The scheme needed a piece of vacant land that linked all the properties but Dublin Dockland Development Authority rejected the idea, although both Dublin City Council and The Arts Council, plus all the local representatives supported the project. As a result, City Arts Centre became an anomaly within the dockland development. Sandy Fitzgerald stepped down as director of the centre in 2000, after 27 years. City Arts Centre, under the directorship of Declan McGonagle, decided to sell the building and to close down its on-site programmes and to engage in what it called the Civil Arts Inquiry, a two-year-long series of meetings, events and symposia aimed at formulating the future needs and future direction of community art. This process proved to be extremely expensive and drained a good deal of the initial capital raised through the sale of the building. However, a new centre was opened on Bachelor's Walk in 2010 with another name change, this time simply called CityArts.
City Quay is short but it features a number of interesting buildings in including a well know church. At 13-18 is a new, nine-storey, headquarters style, flexible office building bounded by City Quay, Princess Street South, Gloucester Street, and St Mary’s Church in Dublin 2. With a discernible presence along the South Quay, 13-18 City Quay is a landmark addition to Dublin’s skyline. The eight-storey-over-basement block of 10,960sq is one of the largest in the docklands and is the new flagship headquarters for Grant Thornton.
I visited the Grant Thornton building earlier in the year and the view from the top floor is amazing and surprising as I was able to seen much more of the city than I thought possible.
The colourful building is City Quay National School which is now a co-educational primary school educating around 160 children in Dublin’s south inner city. They teach children from Junior Infants to 6th Class. The school is under the patronage of the Catholic Archbishop of Dublin. In 1974 it was decided that City Quay Boys School and Townsend Street Girls School should amalgamate. A new school was constructed in the site of the old Boys School, which was originally built in the late 19th century. This project was co-funded by the Department of Education and The Mercy Sisters. The school, as we know it today, opened its doors on September 1st 1977. Today the school continues to be a vibrant place where local and international pupils are welcomed and valued.
Built originally as a chapel of ease to St. Andrews, Westland Row, the Church of the Immaculate Heart of Mary became a parish church in 1908. Built to a design by John Bourke, who worked on several churches throughout the country. The spire was added, to design by John Loftus Robinson, in 1890. It became known as the Docker's Church, catering for the seamen and dockers working on the adjacent City Quay. Numerous decorative details enliven its simple form, including the mosaic representing the Immaculate Heart, Star of the Sea, set in a decorative frame over the main entrance. To the interior, a Calvary scene reputedly made by William Pearse adds artistic interest, as does a mosaic which may have been designed by Arthur Gibney. Stained glass and carved timber and marble fittings are characteristically ecclesiastic elements. The church's neo-Gothic style was typical of Catholic church design in the later nineteenth century. With the adjoining presbytery (50020337) and gate screen (50020338, it forms part of an interesting group of church related structures.
CityArts in Dublin is a community arts organization founded in 1973. in 1988, there was a name change from Grapevine Arts Centre to City Arts Centre when the organisation occupied a warehouse building on the cornet of City Quay and Moss Street near Tara Street Station, then the largest centre of its kind in Ireland. U2 provided fully equipped rehearsal spaces for young bands in the basement. Over this was a cafe and theatre space initially run by Declan Gorman and above that a gallery space initially run by Tommy Weir. Sandy Fitzgerald continued as Director through to 2001. The Arts Council never fully backed the centre favouring the highly regarded Project Arts Centre, despite the City Arts Centre clear leadership profile for community arts.
The Centre actually owned this building, having bought it in a then run-down area. However, the property become valuable. There was an opportunity to create a large civic project, when a partnership between City Quay School to the rear of the centre and a community hall adjacent to the centre were brought into a scheme for an innovative socio/cultural project at the entrance to the docklands, then at the beginning of its transformation. The scheme needed a piece of vacant land that linked all the properties but Dublin Dockland Development Authority rejected the idea, although both Dublin City Council and The Arts Council, plus all the local representatives supported the project. As a result, City Arts Centre became an anomaly within the dockland development. Sandy Fitzgerald stepped down as director of the centre in 2000, after 27 years. City Arts Centre, under the directorship of Declan McGonagle, decided to sell the building and to close down its on-site programmes and to engage in what it called the Civil Arts Inquiry, a two-year-long series of meetings, events and symposia aimed at formulating the future needs and future direction of community art. This process proved to be extremely expensive and drained a good deal of the initial capital raised through the sale of the building. However, a new centre was opened on Bachelor's Walk in 2010 with another name change, this time simply called CityArts.
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