A blog of sketches of historic buildings - Marks of Time

47. marks of time

17/2/2015

The reason why Palace Street moves off the city grid is to avoid this building. This is St Augustine's' Church. The current design is a radical adaption dating from 1872 of a classical predecessor. It is well worth a visit. Its scissor truss roof gives its interior plenty of character. The classical building was a rebuild of the medieval church repaired by the Planters in the Seventeenth Century. There may therefore be fabric in the building which predates the City Walls. The ecclesiastical use of the site is, however, said to stretch back to the Sixth Century when it was the location of the original monastery. The name links the site to an Augustinian Abbey located in the city in the middle ages. It was common for older establishments to adopt this rule following church reforms in the Eleventh Century.

47. marks of time.

16/2/2015

The entrance to the Deanery is particularly fine. It adds grace and grandeur to its surroundings.

46. Marks of time

15/2/2015

I forgot to point out 1 St Columb's Court and the Deanery on Bishop Street. These are two fine Georgian buildings. 1 St Columb's was the Irish Society Office (the company set up to build the plantation city and its walls). It was constructed in 1768. It has a great staircase and lugged doors (where the surround steps out like ears) inside. The Deanery dates from 1833 and has an elegant interior and a very fine entrance door.

45. marks of time

14/2/2015

Palace Street is across Bishop Street from the Northern Counties Club and is full of character. On one side, is the old stone wall and some trees of the former Bishop's Palace garden, on the other, the scale and formality of brick Georgian style buildings step down from Bishops Street to a white rural type building at the end. At this cottage, the street turns right and moves off the grid layout of the Plantation city.

44. marks of time

14/2/2015

Around the corner on Bishop Street is the former Northern Counties Club remodelled in 1902 by the same architect Alfred Forman. This is currently being converted to a boutique hotel and will be well worth the visit when opened. Inside, it has a magnificent staircase with inglenook fire place and fine dining rooms on the first floor overlooking the street.

43. marks of time.

12/2/2015

On the other side of the Diamond is a building constructed around the same time. Diamond Chambers (1899) is another confident piece of architecture this time in the in the Arts and Crafts Style. it was designed by Alfred Foreman who was responsible for a number of fine buildings in the city during the following ten years.

42. marks of time

11/2/2015

Austins department store dominates the Diamond. Constructed in 1906, it is a great confident building full of bays columns and swagger. Inside, it has a double height space on the ground floor and a fine, if slightly tilted, staircase. The restaurant on the top floor provides great views over the city. The building was designed by Matthew A Robinson at the height of the city's economic boom in the early years of the Twentieth Century.

41. marks of time

10/2/2015

Until the early Twentieth Century the Diamond was dominated by this building. Constructed at the end of the Seventeenth Century to replace a predecessor destroyed in the Great Siege, this enclosed an arcaded market at ground level and assembly rooms above. It was renovated and extended in 1832 as the Corporation Hall with ground floor reading rooms. By the twentieth century it was an art college before being removed in 1910 in favour of a municipal garden. Underneath, its cellars are said to remain.

40. marks of time

9/2/2015

Carry on along the street to the ‘Diamond’- the central perfect square space of the Plantation city. Its centre is dominated by the city’s principal war memorial. It was designed by Vernon Marsh of Kent in England and erected in 1928. Victory holding a laurel wreath high and with a dropped sword in her left hand is flanked by dramatic bronzes of a soldier and a sailor. The names of the dead are inscribed in bronze plaques at the base of Victory’s pedestal. The Diamond War Memorial Project of 2007 researched the 756 names on the memorial and published this information on a website.

39.Marks of time

8/2/2015

Now, go back inside the City Walls by walking up Fahan Street and going through Butcher's Gate. The present gate was rebuilt in 1808. This was one of the four original gate positions in the Walls and was the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the Great Siege of 1689. The gate is exposed to driving wind and rain and its external face is quite weathered. Inside, if you look closely, you can see the original parapet of the side wall before it was raised to meet the rebuilt gate. The Church in the distance, in this drawing, is St Eugene's Cathedral. More about that building later.