A six-month project to demolish the giant R & H Hall grain silos on Cork's docklands has begun, kickstarting a €350 million regeneration plan for the historic area.
The 31 metre high concrete silos have been a feature of the city's skyline for 90 years.
Conservation work on the building has been described as ground-breaking in terms of industrial archaeological monitoring, with laser scanning and photogrammetry used to produce a 3D survey of the building.
R & H Hall was founded in Cork in 1839 and is one of Ireland's biggest importers and suppliers of animal feed ingredients for feed manufacturers. The company was bought by the IAWS group in 1990.
Its landmark Cork silos date from the mid-1930s to the early 1950s.
It had been hoped that these could have been incorporated into the re-development plans for 92,903 sq/m site, but developers O'Callaghan Properties said it was not possible to re-purpose them.
The company's Managing Director, Brian O'Callaghan, said they looked at trying to keep and maintain the building but could not.
"The building was designed as a grain silo," he said.
"It is 31 metres tall. There are no floors in it, you can't put windows into it so if you were to take the top off the building it looks like a honeycomb, and each silo is two metres in diameter and there are 128 of them, so there was no way of re-purposing the building.
"The new silo will be in the same shape and the same footprint as what is there at the moment so it will reflect the architecture and industrial heritage of the site and of the old silo.
"What you will see there will reflect what is there already but repurposed for a 21st century use."
The demolition of the silos marks the commencement of a vast project to develop the docklands on the southside of the River Lee.
Planning permission for the O'Callaghan Properties project was granted in May 2023, and is comprised of 92,903 sq/m of development including a 130-bed rehabilitation hospital, three office blocks, residential accommodation and the restoration and re-purposing into apartments of the Odlums Mills building.
As part of the demolition process, a comprehensive archaeological recording and conservation process was undertaken carried out under the guidance of Dr Colin Rynne, Director of the Historic Building Survey Unit, Department of Archaeology, University College Cork.
Some of the industrial machinery within the silos, such as one of the grain dryers has already been safely dismantled and put in storage to be re-installed in parts of the Kennedy Quay project.
A number of the grain hoppers are also to be preserved and re-instated in the reception area of one of the planned buildings.
"This is probably the most complex survey of its kind attempted in Ireland to date," Dr Rynne said.
"This building can be recreated in 3D - you can walk through it, you can go from floor to floor.
"You can have a kind of lived experience of this building apart form the smells and the rodents and everything else but this is the most detailed record that has ever been possible for future generations to appreciate what this building was about."
The project is to be undertaken in phases and take between 10 to 15 years.
The developers OCP has responded to calls to save the building's iconic signage.
During the past week they have been removed and until a decision on their future is made, OCP said they will be safely stored.
Made of plastic, with corroded metal back fixings, many are said to be badly deteriorated "as might be expected from exposure to the elements over the years", the company said.
"We do understand the affection and symbolism relating to these letters and that is why we have gone to the trouble to carefully remove them for retention," it said.
"However, the letters are a corporate name i.e., R & H Hall. We cannot give authority to use or display a corporate name of an entity that we do not own.
"We would be happy to look with the local authority at potential ways to retain the letters in the future public realm but again, this will require the agreement of the entity owners.
"In the meantime, the letters will be safely stored."
