Restoration of a cast iron structure dating from the 1890's
Its location was moved twice before coming to its most well known location on St. Patricks Street in 1904. Once the need to store firefighting equipment around the city became obsolete the Rest was then used by the national transport company to sell bus tickets from until 2002 when the Rest was moved to storage while Patrick's street was renovated. It was in this storage yard in 2023 that we first saw the Rest and the poor condition it was in.
The Rest was originally produced by the well know Walter MacFarlane foundry of Glasgow who at the time were pioneers in the creation of prefabricated modular structures using cast iron. The Rest would have arrived to Cork in a flat pack form and assembled on site.
Unfortunately due to wear and tear over time, modification, as well as being moved as one piece without being disassembled, the Rest had suffered significant damage and was missing a lot of its iconic decorative detailing. With these factors at play the restoration of the Firemens Rest is to date the most involved and complicated restoration we have undertaken.
To avoid causing further damage to the Rest we had to first shore it up to make it structurally sound before documenting it and then disassembling it into its component parts for transport to our workshop. Once the component parts had returned from sandblasting we carried out a detailed assessment of the condition of each part.
While a few of the original decorative cast iron panels were damaged beyond repair the vast majority of the original parts were in a saveable condition. In the case of the irreparable or missing structural components originals were sent to a foundry in Scotland to have copies recast in iron.
As all the decorative cast components, such as the drip rail tiles and the roof cresting, were missing we had to work from both the very early pictures of the Rest as well as the original MacFarlane catalogue to create templates from scratch from which new castings could be made.
Overall while it was an incredible amount of work and unlike any restoration we've taken on in the past. We are very happy with the end result.
