Inside The Dark History Behind Ireland’s Grandest Buildings

This is Dame Street in the heart of Dublin, one of the busiest streets in the capital. Traffic, shoppers and commuters throng here now, but in the late 18th and 19th centuries this street was brimming with banks. These magnificent banking halls tell a fascinating story that is much more than the chronicle of a finance house. It's a tale full of symbolism, social and political ambition and a notorious financial scandal. And it's part of the bigger story of Building Ireland. In this programme our team, an architect, an engineer and a geographer, is exploring some of the finest examples of Ireland's building and engineering heritage. And this time we uncover the banking halls of Dublin's Dame Street. Into this half-mile stretch of Dame Street were crammed the biggest and most influential banks in Ireland. And in this competitive environment, what your bank looked like on the outside and in was as important as the interest rate you were getting. Image was everything. Built in the 19th century, these buildings give the impression that they've been here for hundreds of years. The architecture reflects the bank's message of the time, one of stability, security and continuity. Starting in 1820, over 800 banking halls and branches were built throughout Ireland. The business of banking in Dublin was especially booming. The city had to respond with better infrastructure as engineer Tim Joyce is discovering. Banks were helping to fuel Dublin's growing trade and commerce, but 140 years ago the Docklands were in need of a radical overhaul just to keep up. The solution was a brilliant piece of Irish engineering and it's still here. And this expanding city is being explored by geographer Susan Hegarty. For centuries the urban geography of our capital city has evolved around the River Liffey. And where you have rivers, you have bridges. Some bridges have helped change the shape and nature of Dublin forever. None more so than O'Connell Bridge. The story of the modern Irish banking hall begins in 1731 in the Irish Houses of Parliament on College Green in Dublin. This was the first purpose-built two-chamber parliament house in the world, with a House of Commons and a House of Lords. At this time Dublin's social and economic confidence was on a real high. Three very different architects would go on to work on the Irish Houses of Parliament over a period of 60 years and yet there's a very strong consistency in style. They were guided by Palladian architecture, reimagining the design, proportions and style of ancient Greece and Rome. The classical entrance to the Houses of Parliament is a perfectly proportioned colonnade of ionic columns which forms the letter E. This is the seat of power in Dublin and the dimensions are exactly as architect Alexander Loved Pierce designed them in the 18th century. The royal coat of arms takes centre stage. There was legislation, there was bills that were Sean O'Learcy is the resident guide for the House of Lords. Within the parliament itself there was many members of the parliament who were descended from planted stock people that had been brought in by the English during the colonisation and they considered themselves to be Irish and many of them fought to improve the rights of Catholics particularly Henry Grattan who was a member of the House of Commons. Has this room changed much? Only one change in fact in the chamber you would have had the rows of benches that the members sat on when the house was in session and when it was converted for use as a bank those seats were removed but other than that what we have here in the chamber today is exactly what was here when the Act of Union was enacted in 1800. The Act of Union changed Irish political history and it also changed the fate of this purpose-built parliament house. The London government decided to sell the building to the Bank of Ireland and an architectural competition was announced that would fundamentally alter the building. Converting the building into a bank meant getting rid of the House of Commons chamber permanently. Radical designs proposed the construction of imposing domes that would have dominated Dublin's skyline. The architect who had the most impact on the shape of the evolving building was Francis Johnson. He reworked the front of the building with a curving screen granite wall embracing the symmetry of the streetscape but the real purpose was to hide the structure of the buildings behind. A new free market banking act in 1824 opened up opportunities for rival banks to challenge the monopoly of the Bank of Ireland. Banking was about to be revolutionised through the construction of a swathe of stunning new banks and banking halls the length of Dame Street. These cathedrals of capitalism represented the power and the prestige of a bank and in a city booming with mercantile trade you had to impress. New banks like the Hibernian, the Belfast Bank, the Ulster and the Royal Bank were established in 10 short years and each of them had their own distinctive architecture. The banking boom funded new ventures in commerce and shipping but by the middle of the 19th century Dublin needed a bigger and better port and Tim is setting out to discover how they were going to build underwater. This odd metal structure on Sir John Rogerson's Quay played a crucial role in building the foundations of modern Dublin as the port kept up with the trade demands of the British Empire. An Irish engineer from Burr County Offaly, Bindon Blood Stoney, was pioneering new methods in port construction. With the finest Victorian engineers of the day said his proposed plans for Dublin port just wouldn't work. Up to then there was really only one way to build a dock wall. A wooden dam would be constructed around the site and the water behind it pumped out. This is known as cofferdamming. Only then could workers cut and shape the stone blocks and form the quay wall but Bindon Blood Stoney did away with all that. Building a timber dam was slow and expensive. Stoney developed a diving bell system which would allow for the replacement of stone and rubble with massive concrete blocks. In 1869 he was about to find out if his innovative but unproven system would work. The principle underpinning this type of diving bell is simple. Once submerged the air in a closed bell is trapped by the pressure of water. Stoney's bell uses the same principle with an iron chamber 20 foot square and access to it is through an iron shaft with an airlock. The dredger would prepare the base and the diving bell would be lowered into the riverbed. The chamber was big enough to take a crew of six men and they cleared the ground at their feet. All the excavated soil and debris was stored in baskets hanging inside the bell. The bell worked for almost 100 years until it was decommissioned in 1964. I met with some dockers who remember it in full operation. Did you know the guys working in the bell? What did you think of them? A difficult question to answer because they were an elitist group. We'd be walking on the ship here and you would see the bell go out to sea and you would think to yourself what the hell is that thing? And also it was fairly dangerous in that the people working in that to keep the water out they had to put a very high pressure air in and the heat used to rise up corresponding to the pressure and people would get dehydrated, burst their drums and a highly dangerous job so the people who worked in that really earned their money. With the riverbed clear and level the foundation blocks could be laid by crane. These 350 ton concrete monoliths were cast on site and each one took four weeks to make. They were hoisted using Stoney's massive shear crane and dropped precisely into position. Stoney's system proved a resounding success and in a matter of months the North Quay wall was advancing out into Dublin Bay. Technical innovations of the day were also driving the need for bigger and longer quays. More and more ships were being built of iron and their holes were structurally much stronger than those made of timber. Because iron was stronger ships could be bigger, much bigger. These new monster ships needed deep water docks and quays and they couldn't be held up waiting on the tide. Metal ships were actually lighter than the original wooden ones and the future of shipping and trade lay with iron vessels. From 1860 to the 1890s Dublin Port and the city's quay walls were rebuilt under the direction of Benden Blood Stoney. New berths and docks independent of the tides attracted the biggest ships of the age to Dublin and the port grew substantially in the late 19th century. The splendor of bank buildings in Dublin is not just a story of growth and success. Social and political freedoms were being fought for on Dame Street as well. The Catholic population, like the majority which was over 90 percent, really hadn't any say in what went on here in the Parliament or indeed in the legislation that was being passed. So what would the building have represented to the people of Dublin? Well it represented I suppose colonization, it represented the empire in that sense. A rising Catholic middle class was emerging in Dublin with ambition for economic progress and hungry for power but they had no access to credit. Then in 1829 Catholic emancipation changed the institutional and financial landscapes. Prominent Irish politicians and businessmen now came together to found the National Bank of Ireland. One name amongst them stands out, Daniel O'Connell. King Dan, or the Liberator as he was known, dominated the Irish political scene but without economic prosperity Catholic political gains would be undermined. O'Connell spearheaded a new financial institution, the National Bank, to establish its headquarters here at 34 and 35 College Green, directly opposite, physically and metaphorically, the Protestant and Unionist Bank of Ireland. The National Bank later established branches in every provincial main street across the four provinces of Ireland but this was the first purpose-built banking head office in Dublin and it was designed to impress. The architectural influence is Italian. The Granite Palazzo facade speaks of the fashionable European architecture of the 1830s. This building makes a bold political statement. The politics is in the architecture, carved in stone, and there's no doubting this bank's political allegiances. Over O'Connell's National Bank, Erin Gibra, Ireland forever. It promotes the icons of Hibernia and Celtic romanticism. A round tower, the Wolfhound and the Irish harp, carved by Porrick Pearce's father James. It's in sharp contrast with the stone carvings for the Ulster Bank next door. Here the iconography is all about Britannia, justice and commerce. The Ulster was established just two years after the National Bank and its street facade has a dominating balcony and elaborately carved motifs. A typical 19th century bank building had its vaults in the basement, the public banking hall at ground level and the manager's office on the first floor. These buildings were workspaces for the written word. High vaulted domes attracted plenty of natural light, flooding the counters and clerks' desks and illuminating ledgers, cash tills and parchments. Dublin's position as the second city of empire meant its urban streetscape was adapting beyond the confines of the River Liffey, as Susan is setting out to explore. The Liffey is the central archery of the city and as the city expanded how people got across became more and more important. The construction of one bridge in 1795 changed the physical axis of the entire city, the Carlisle Bridge. O'Connell Bridge is world famous today for being as wide as long but the Carlisle Bridge which first stood here was only 12 and a half meters wide. The widening of the bridge took place a hundred years after it was first built. To understand why they widened the bridge we have to look back to one of the first great initiatives of European town planning. The White Streets Commission in the 18th century remodeled the geography of Dublin's streetscape. The commission comprised some of the most privileged members of an Irish elite. On their grand tours of Europe they were inspired by ideas of maintaining civic order in society through architecture and town planning. I met Graeme Hickey of the Dublin Civic Trust to find out what they did. The commissioners effectively had control to manipulate private property which is something that didn't really exist in the city before and you can see on this, this is a very good example, the old line of Dame Street is marked in in a faint manner but very clearly the new buildings with their regular facades and this is typical of what the commissioners wanted, rational, ordered, aesthetically rigid architecture replacing the old organically developed medieval streets. So they created new streets, they widened existing streets, they opened up views of major public buildings but most inevitably of all is that they had a real civic ambition of how they saw Dublin as an international capital and the level of control that they exerted over development of the city is really quite unique on a European level. The commission also had ambitious designs on public infrastructure. The original Carlisle bridge was built in 1795 but it was a narrow humpback bridge that didn't match the ambition of the White Streets Commission. They wanted a thoroughfare that united the Grand Boulevard of Sackville Street and Southside Dublin but ultimately it was traffic congestion that forced a change. By 1860 the old bridge simply couldn't cope with all the human and horse-drawn traffic. 1,037 vehicles per hour were crossing the bridge. At the same time London Bridge was carrying 1,091. Dublin was just as busy as London. The bridge needed a radical overhaul. Dublin's best known engineer Bindon Blood-Stoney took up the challenge. The bridge had to be widened, the piers in the riverbed had to be lengthened and the arches extended and the Carlisle bridge was effectively swallowed up inside the new bridge. Probably the greatest lasting impact that the White Streets Commissioners had on the centre of Dublin was reorientating the entire commercial core of the city away from what is now Grattan Bridge and moving the whole gravity of the city eastwards towards where is now O'Connell Bridge. A bridge is so much more than a piece of construction. It's a symbol of modernisation and progress and it's our contribution to the geography of our towns and cities. Over the past 250 years each generation of Dubliners has put a new bridge on the River Liffey. Right now there are around 24 bridges in the greater Dublin area. I have to say around 24 because we're still building them. The boom and quality of banking architecture accelerated in the late 19th century. Customers were drawn to these ambitious buildings like the Provincial Bank on Westmoreland Street. The square mile around Dame Street and College Green was becoming the financial hub of the city. Once the original bank buildings were constructed that was not the end of the architectural effort. The grand Victorian banking halls of Dublin were only fully realised in the last decades of the century after years of remodelling and redecoration. The culture of rivalry between the banks and their architecture remained just as competitive. Building on skills imported from Italy, Dublin's stucco doors were renowned for their fine plasterwork. It's a craft being kept alive today by people like Frank Newman. So the very delicate detailed elaborate work, who and how would that have been done? The stucco doors that would do the in-situ work which is more an artist's work where they would actually form all the flowers and the leaves in-situ. So they gradually build them up, shape them, pare them back. Would they have worked to patterns or particular styles in the different periods? It depends on the period. Some of the periods were more random where the patterns didn't repeat. As it progressed maybe 1850s onwards they tend to have a set pattern. Okay Orla it's your turn to go. Now remember the most important thing is once the plaster starts to mix is you have to move. The plaster is the master. Great so what's the first thing? You put your gloves on and then you start mixing. Dig in deep. So yeah I should be looking to try to get all of the dry powder mixed in. Consistency yeah. Is that, how's that looking? Looking good yeah ready to put your first coat on. Okay should I keep the gloves on for that? Leave the gloves on yes leave the gloves on. Okay more? Yeah yeah lashing on. Lashing on okay. Yeah yeah more more more stuff. So I'm looking to get a couple of mil layer on it. That's looking good that's looking very good yeah that'll be set now in about 10-15 minutes. That's very fast isn't it? It is yeah. So do you think it might be ready yet? It should be yeah yeah yes it's getting warm it's getting warm I think. It's actually warm to the touch. It does yeah. How come? Yeah it's just the heat from the from the setting process. Because it was cold. Very warm yeah very warm. Okay well let's see how you did. Okay do it very gently voila. Oh she's lovely. I will make a stucco door out of you. I don't know nothing wrong with that for a first attempt. Professor Christine Casey has written extensively on the architectural history of Dublin and understands the motivation of the architects and craftsmen of the day in how they communicated the bank's message. And the desire is clearly in some of those interiors to astound to awe to impress with the great wealth and importance of these institutions undoubtedly. So there's a sense of the city as theatre then almost? Well I think architecture it's performative fundamentally and I think that you know I mean you can go back to antiquity and you will find that people use architecture and particularly use ornament and beautiful materials to achieve magnificence. One building in particular had a huge influence in shaping the look of Dame Street. The big thing that happened is the museum building of Trinity College and as soon as that's built and finished in the mid 1850s you know your next bank up there is 1863 you have Thomas Newnham Dean building several of those banks and they're all in some way referring to the museum building and they're using of course like the museum building amazing materials and wonderful craftsmanship I mean that the crafting of the stone the colour you know you instead of just granite you've portland stone you've ballinasloe you've you know connemara limestone you polish pink granite so it's it's you know it's showtime to a certain extent. The head office of the Munster Bank on Dame Street is among the finest examples of a late Victorian bank building. From an architect's point of view this branch of the Munster Bank was really very successful but in June 1885 this building was at the heart of a financial scandal. The Munster Bank was founded in 1864 and grew rapidly establishing a branch network in rural Ireland and even buying out other banks but the bank was repeatedly criticised for overextending its credit and for allowing its branches to run autonomously. On June 26 1885 five directors of the Munster Bank on Dame Street were found guilty of insider lending on a grand scale. A few days later an astonished public was told that Robert Farquharson one of the joint managers of the Dame Street branch had defrauded the bank of some £70,000 and was on the run. This led to a dramatic bank collapse and revelations of careless lending to property developers and elite socialites. Banker Robert Farquharson was last spotted on the platform of the railway station on Amiens Street. He vanished without a trace. The collapse of the Munster Bank was the first consumer banking crash in Irish financial history but it wouldn't be the last. The fashion for building magnificent banking halls declined with the tastes of the Victorian era. The consolidation of banking brought an end to the construction of these cathedrals to capital but the splendour of these halls has found a new architectural relevance. These buildings speak of an unshakable belief in progress and this was a predominant value in an evolving 19th century Dublin society. With the demise of Grattan's parliament Dublin's rising middle classes began to change the city's trading and financial infrastructure. The axis of power in Dublin had radically changed both physically and politically. The legacy of these magnificent buildings and the story of their rise and fall has left an indelible impression on the built heritage of our capital city.