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You feel music in the heart. THE SCRAPPERS Hammon
d Lane The Docklands are always a liminal zone in a city, at the borderline where the carefullyordered landscape of houses, shops and offices gives way to the messy spaces where the city ingests new materials and expels the waste it’s produced. On Pigeon House Road you can still just about see the curve of the Aviva stadium roof, but it feels a long way from Dublin 4. The huge derrick cranes of the port stand ahead, beside stacks of shipping containers 30 metres high. Close beside is the futuristic metal enclosure of the Poolbeg incinerator, and further off, the chimneys of the Poolbeg power station – the only part of this landscape visible from the city. Hammond Lane’s company history mirrors that of Dublin. Founded at the height of Victorian prosperity, it was originally a foundry making everything from bedsteads to the grates that line Dublin’s streets. At its peak on Hammond Lane near the Four Courts, it employed nearly as many as Guinness’. As Ireland’s economy contracted, so did the company, and as the city centre was redeveloped, Hammond Lane moved to Sir John Rogerson’s Quay. As that area was in turn redeveloped to become 200 Capital Dock, the company moved further out again. The docklands have been sanitized and their history scrubbed into new narratives, but on Pigeon House road there’s not an artisan coffee maker or wine bar in sight. Nowadays, Hammond Lane reclaims and recycles the metal from demolished buildings, and the remains of everything knocked down in Dublin pass through the yard here. What’s left of AIB’s bank centre in Ballsbridge and of the Dublin Distillers’ building in Smithfield is currently being fed into huge multi-storey machines that will pulverise it and add it to the twisted, dusty mountain of metallic fragments that looms in the centre of the yard. It’ll then be shipped out to Spain, where it’s smelted and reforged into new girders and rebar that’ll probably end up in the next set of gleaming Tech and Legal HQs in the Docklands. It’s a perfect cog in the circular economy, and paradoxically, one of the greenest businesses around. Mick Brown, the site manager, has worked for Hammond Lane since he left school nearly 40 years ago, and he talks with a quiet pride about the human scale of what the company does. “Most of our work is commercial and what we do is very basic – steel in, steel out. That’s not going to change much. But what we’re seeing is a change in people where this is becoming more second nature to them. We’re open to the public for any type of metal, and people come down quite regularly with anything from metal flower pots to copper cylinders to cars. “People get very upset when their cars need to be recycled – they seem to feel the pain of the car being shredded. There are tearful goodbyes, and you have to reassure them that it’ll be coming back as something else – it’s like being a counsellor. We get people to check that they haven’t left phones, or rings, or pictures or anything that shouldn’t get shredded. But I can remember a time many years ago when a car went through the shredder and there were thousands of 50 Euro notes flying around! “I’d say we’re the oldest recycling company in Ireland, and we’re a very old part of Dublin’s history – we go back to 1898. We had dances on the roof of Clery’s, and David Lloyd’s Tennis Club in Donnybrook was once the Hammond Lane Sports and Social Club. The metal company here is the last of the ones in the Hammond Lane group, but it’s the best, and we’re now expanding again around the country. So, we have a big new state-of-the-art place in Clondalkin, with probably 200 in the company in total around Ireland. “I love it. I was just very lucky when I left school – I had no idea what I wanted to do, but I happened to be in the right place at the right time, and it’s worked out very well.” ➝ hammondlane.ie 28