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We’ll consider anything and if we think we’ll sel
l it, we’ll take it in – I don’t like to see anything that’s quality thrown away. THE SALVAGERS Bailey Gibson As you travel down the South Circular Road, Bailey Gibson is virtually invisible: you could easily miss the small copper script sign high on one of the pillars that flank the narrow entrance. But, when you pass inside, beyond the redbrick houses that line the road the size of the site becomes apparent. It’s huge: nearly three acres of yards and warehouses, with every conceivable type of building material strewn around. There’s a huge stone fountain, dry, weathered and flanked by grizzled, metre-tall lions. There’s a pile of traffic lights, sparkling in the sun as though they’re still flashing from red to green. There are huge cast iron pillars, stacks of encaustic tiles, limestone coping, and copper statues covered in verdigris. Step into one of the warehouses, and the experience becomes more fantastic. There’s more of that high-end building detritus – Georgian casement windows, oak panelling, hoppers full of Victorian taps, artfully singed and stained floorboards – but also much more phantasmagorical things. You can wander past a seven-metre high church organ, through several entire pub interiors, laid out as though they’re ready for first orders, and stop at a shop counter manned by an old medical skeletal dummy. It’s as though the wreckage of our civilisation had been discovered far into the future, and then those future archeologists had tried to recreate how we once lived, without understanding how any of these things related to each other. Even Bailey Gibson’s name is recycled: it’s the name of the printers who used these yards before the firm relocated here 15 years ago. But the business is much older than that, and over the decades has assembled a collection of architectural oddments from Dublin and far beyond. Joe Byrne, who runs it with his business partner Sean Travers, told me how it all came about. “We go out looking for stuff, and there’s also builders in town who come to us when they’re renovating or knocking a building. We’ll consider anything and if we think we’ll sell it, we’ll take it in – I don’t like to see anything that’s quality thrown away. We travel to England, and we’ve bought the interiors from a few chapels there. Some we sell as pews, others we break up, or we sell them as countertops. We went over to Wales to buy timber flooring from an old police station and when we went into the building, we saw that there was a courthouse upstairs. So we took a chance and brought it over, and after having a few photoshoots on it, we’ve now sold it to a hotelier in Kildare. “We bought the interior of the old Bole’s chemist down in Inchicore, set it up as a bar and sold it to a place in Antrim. We bought another chemist’s shop in Naas and sold it to a pub in Cork. The most unusual request from a client was for a light airplane for the Merchant near Ha’penny bridge – a Cessna or something like that. He got it in the end, but not through us. But we put a lot of stuff into the Wild Duck on Sycamore Street, and the Bowery in Rathmines. I often walk into places around Dublin and realise that some of it came from our yard. “There’s a market in Dublin because there’s a lot of period houses here, and the past few years have been great, with people renovating buildings. But a lot of that work is done. There are more and more buildings now that we can’t do – conservation architects will keep things in them. Things like old floorboards in particular are getting harder and harder to find, and there’ll come a time when you can’t find them at all. And there’s a lot of newer Chinese stuff coming in now, particularly fountains and statues for gardens. It can be great quality, but we want something that’s genuinely old, that’s looking for a new life. “In the last four or five years or so we started to build up items specially for film props, and most of the set dressers in Dublin now would know us. Any films that have come to town – Ripper Street, Red Rock, The Professor and the Madman – we’ve had pieces on, and we also do fit-outs for programs like Dancing With The Stars. Some of it comes back too: we supplied materials for the bar in Red Rock, and when they were closing production we bought the bar back from them. I’d say we’ll have it for a while, unless they make a new series. “Often the piece you like most ends up sitting around for ages. We have iron columns from the old Jervis Street hospital that’ve been here for 25 years – they were bought by a client in the UK and then sent back when he couldn’t find a use for them. And we have granite blocks that we bought out of Boland’s Mills. You’ll never see the likes of those again: they’re massive, and not the easiest things to sell, but with the amount of work that went into quarrying and dressing them, I felt we had to take a punt. Sometimes you win and sometimes you don’t. That’s the joy of it. ● Old Bailey Gibson Yard, 326-328 South Circular Rd, Dublin 8 30