I’ve been living in Galway City for just over four years now. When I arrived, the city was a huge building site, with dozens of new apartment blocks, shops and even the odd road under construction [and a few old ones getting demolished to make room for them]. I decided at the time to document the construction activity in the city – to record how the city was changing. It’s funny – Galway is a small city and yet there was no shortage of derelict or undeveloped sites. It is amazing how much space still remains in the city, despite the best effort s of developers and councillors.
As for my project, I realised quickly that I had a problem. I don’t have that much free time to take photographs – actually, I don’t have that much free time at all – and there was simply too much building work happening around the city. [I really wanted to document the building of the motorway between Athlone and Galway, but the amount of time required was more than i could spare. Plus, the road crews have built the roads far faster than I expected – the final leg is expected to open in early spring 2010]. So I picked just a few sites that I have repeatedly photographed in various states of construction.
Of course, the rate of construction has slowed considerably due to the bursting of the Irish property bubble. Most of the buildings that I photographed were started [or were already underway] in 2005, so most have finished in the last year. It will be interesting to see how the commercial building featured in the series fare over the next few years.
The first in the series [there will only be about a dozen in all] was a project that happened literally on my doorstep. When I moved to Galway first, I lived in an apartment in the harbour area (it was part of the Galway Harbour Hotel complex). Beside my building was a large circular grey shed near the harbour lock gates. The building was no longer in use – it had been built to store ore taken from the lead and zinc mines from Tynagh Mines in east Galway – the mine closed in 1981.
The demolition of the shed began around the beginning of July 2005, and the site was cleared and levelled by November. According to a planning permission notice pinned to the fence surrounding the site, the Galway Harbour Company (which owns all the land and buildings in the Galway Harbour area) had applied to build offices and warehouses on the site. However, the following month, the site was converted into a car park which is still there.
So, welcome to the first of “The Making of Galway” series – the demolition of the Tynagh Mines shed in Galway Harbour.