Salvage what you can
MY FORMER husband was keen on architectural salvage. It was the early 1990s and the notion of buying bits of old buildings was relatively new. For a young man doing up his first house, it was a journey of discovery. He trawled the architectural salvage yards and came up with gems.
Old stained glass windows, countertops of solid teak, and a free standing hairy-legged cast iron bath. It was a beast of a yoke. He was just arranging to haul it into the upstairs bathroom when his architect stopped him.
“That bath, full of water and with you in it,” said the architect succinctly, “is going to fall straight through the ceiling.”
The bath was retired to my parents’ back garden where it remained for many years. In the end it probably ended up right back in the same salvage yard that it came from.
Architectural salvage yards have always been with us only they used to be known as junk yards. Then, sometime in the 1980s, architectural salvage became “a thing”. For the guts of 20 years, savvy dealers made a killing. One man’s trash is another man’s treasure. That’s the basic principle of architectural salvage. Now, one of Dublin’s largest architectural salvage yards is clearing its decks. BG Salvage is hidden away beside the old John Player factory on the South Circular Road. It’s a massive fiveacre site, stuffed to the gills with bits of old buildings (along with an interesting scattering of film props). The sale will be conducted by Damien Matthew of Matthew’s Auction Rooms. Because of the sheer volume of stuff, Stephen Ryan, a young auctioneer from Newry, has been called in to give a hand.
Ryan admires a pile of carved granite keystones, each piece painstakingly carved by skilled hands.
“I like stone that’s been worked,” he comments. He moves on to a dusty stack of doors. There are Georgian doors, doors with stained glass panels, unused PVC doors with the tape still on them, and a series of curve-top doors that may once have been part of a church.
With round brass-rimmed portholes in each one they’d make your home look like a hobbit hole, but you’d have to build the doorway frame to fit them. All of these, plus another 4,000 lots, are part of the four-day sale that begins today and continues until Monday. Even if you’re not in the market for keystone and doors, it’s worth going down to get a look at an entire 19th-century coroner’s court (est €80,000 to €120,000). “It came from Caerphilly in Wales,” Ryan explains. “It’s proper Victorian and the seats are perfect.” The court is a massive construction of built-in furniture, 10 metres long, with enough leather-upholstered seating to accommodate a jury of 12 as well as the coroner and witnesses. It seeks a buyer with a lot of imagination.
The selection includes many items from many landmark buildings: discarded railings from Trinity College; the entrance doors from Jury’s Hotel in Dublin; stained -glass windows from the demolished church at St James’ Hospital; the original armoury doors from Clancy Barracks; five ornate cast-iron columns from the original Jervis Street building; and 33 cast iron -columns, riveted steel beams, and doors from Boland’s Mill. Those fittings have seen some action. During the 1916 Rising, Boland’s Mill was captured by the 3rd Battalion of the Irish Volunteers, led by Éamon De Valera, and served as the headquarters for the Volunteers.
The auction begins on the premises today, 326 South Circular Road, Dublin, at 11.30 am and continues until Monday. Viewing is from 9am on each day.
See matthewsauctionrooms.com.