R&H Hall

The people of Ferrybank are upset by a new proposal to site some sort of waste transfer facility on the North Wharfs.  I’m not sure what waste transfer is.  There are two chief objections to this proposal, the first being that it might smell.  Surely, you may think, it couldn’t be that bad, but Ferrybank has a history of bad smells emanating from the meat processing industry that was traditionally banished to the north side of Waterford city.  The smell from some of the meat plants was legendary, a rotten combination of wet dog, dirty nappy, vomit and what I imagined to be burst, decomposing intestines.  That’s in the past now but people in Ferrybank are entitled to be sensitive about odours.  The other concern is the effect such a facility will have on the city centre because the North Wharf, isolated and barren though it is, is a city centre location and this waste transfer facility (still don’t know what that is) will be visible from Waterford’s shopping and tourist districts.  The city council has said the facility (?), if it gets permission, won’t create these problems, so we’ll see.  But all the comment on the issue got me thinking about our North Wharfs, which are routinely described here as an urban blight, an embarrassment in urgent need of redevelopment.  Now I don’t deny that Waterford could make better use of the north side of its river and if by some miracle a private sector investor (Donald Trump is at a loose end at the moment) comes in with a plan rip everything out of the North Wharfs and put in whatever combination of conference centre/hotel/casino/gym/equestrian centre/wax museum they think appropriate, that can only be considered a good thing and I’m all for it.  It’s just that…I kind of like North Wharfs as they are.  And I particularly like the R&H Hall Flour Mills, probably the biggest building in Waterford City Centre, and, for many, the ugliest. I can’t really dispute that it’s ugly, but it’s the kind of ugliness that fascinates rather than repels.  Every time I walk past its decayed vastness, the tiny broken windows on the plain imposingly grey walls, the grain silos packed together like an October display of Soviet nuclear missiles, its sheer emptiness, I’m transfixed.  Get closer and you see that the site is served by an abandoned rail track and the only thing more evocative and cinematic than a rail track is surely an abandoned rail track.  Industrial decay isn’t pretty but I can look at it for hours, to the point that once while taking a train across the Pennines from Manchester to Leeds I remember being disappointed by the absence of slag heaps, disused factories and abandoned smokestacks (there were some, just not enough).  Yet we don’t have a habit of celebrating our industrial heritage in Ireland; we’re the land of saints and scholars, rebels and poets and farming.  Not industry and business.  In our imagination we appear to have skipped the Industrial revolution and gone straight from subsistence farming to IT, financial services and web design.  But dotted around the country we do have some imposing monuments to an industrial past (the cotton mill in Portlaw employed more than one and half thousand people at the time of the famine).  These were not usually buildings designed for prettiness.  The stately 18^th century Georgian mansions and town houses that we always think of as our built heritage were designed with one eye to the past and the other to posterity, based on Palladian Roman models they were built to reflect the imagined values of an older age, to herald not change but stability.  The later Victorian age was marked by an intellectual backlash against itself, as the dominant Romantic trend in intellectual life reacted in horror to industrialisation.  The reaction against functional industrial buildings included a rejection of the classical forms of the Georgians, considered by Victorian intellectuals to be part of a Godless complacency that informed this modern uglification of cities.  John Ruskin was the great champion of this dual rejection of both modern and classical forms, with an imagined medieval gothic aesthetic considered a more natural and pure form of architecture.  Now in Waterford we have a few fine examples of that manifesto, the Presentation Convent – now the Waterford Health Park – designed by Augustus Pugin (Pugin and Ruskin had similiar attitudes to architecture but like good intellectuals detested each other, Ruskin in particular demonstrating a pettiness that would make an eight year old proud).  It would be an act of insanity to claim that the R&H Hall building is as impressive as the Presentation Convent – it isn’t – but bear with me.  The capitalists of Ruskin’s age didn’t care too much for the  views of bearded Oxbridge aesthetes and while some functional buildings may have been designed with a nod to beauty, most were, and are, functional.  However when a building is built with posterity in mind, like our Georgian and Gothic masterpieces, it has a monumental quality which changes little with or without human activity.  The industrial decay of a highly functional building like R&H Hall immediately suggests the passage of time, forgotten lives, or, in a word, stories.  It’s cinematic.  One day it will be torn down, hopefully to make way for something better but until that day I’ll continue to enjoy its monumental ugliness which contrasts nicely with our Georgian thoroughfares and Gothic towers.  After all, every great beauty needs a blemish.  Until it finds a better use, our North Wharfs are to me a gritty reminder of an industrial and maritime heritage we should be proud of.